Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 168: Cincinnati's Ghost Subway

Starting point is 00:00:00 All right, I got the video going I got my local audio going me too. Yeah. Yeah local good and now The Zen caster is also going in three two one mark. That's three two one mark Useful anyone might think we were professionals and No one would ever fucking think of that of us. I have the emails I have been sending Back and forth with these people where they're just like hey like very professional email for when I'm just like, yeah, it sounds good Dude, I don't fuck it. What do you want me to say just high warm regard? No, I listen I actually want to give one special shout out I will not name my co-worker, but I will name her her husband Tim

Starting point is 00:00:45 I will not name my coworker, but I will name her husband, Tim. This unnamed coworker has told me that her husband, I believe is an engineer and is a fan of the podcast, and she's like, you know how fucking disorienting it is to come downstairs at like 7.30 in the morning and just hear your voice? So Tim, hello. ALICE Hi Tim. Sorry, sorry to your wife that we are in your house. Well actually we live in your walls, it's crazy how we fit in there. Yeah we've been doing a sort of a parasite situation.

Starting point is 00:01:13 No, no love for them, whatever. I was just thinking about how that would look, yeah, you know. Do you think we could all fit in the walls? I wouldn't. Why am I bulging outwards, you know? Yeah, me too, I'm right there with you, Nova. Why are the walls so fat and ungainly, and I'm just like lying behind the wall? Why is there a beer belly shaped series of cracks in my drywall?

Starting point is 00:01:38 Just like, that's very hurtful coming from the insulation. Alright. Uh, hello. And welcome to... Well, Scares Your Problem. ["Scarred Your Problem Theme"] Fuck you. That's right, it's the Halloween. It's the Halloween episode.

Starting point is 00:02:04 I'm Justin Rosniak, brackets scary. My pronouns are boo, and, YAAA! It's not bad, actually. It's pretty good. I'm EvilNovemberKelly. You can tell because I didn't shave for like, five minutes since I've grown a goatee. My pronouns are still she and her though, because Halloween is no excuse to misgender me.

Starting point is 00:02:31 Yay Liam? Yay Liam. Uh, hey, so my name is uh, scary Liam McAnderson. Nailed it. Absolutely nailed it. You can tell, because I'm in your walls, collapsing your whatever, your house. And please don't say things about my body, it's very hurtful to me. My pronouns are he and him, and you know we used to do better at these Halloween episodes

Starting point is 00:02:57 I think, with the haunted ships that everybody got mad at us for. It's fine, we'll get it next year. I couldn't work something in like that for this one. It's abandoned, ooooh, and your future is of Silverado 3500 squishing you like a bug. Ooooooh. Do you wanna work in a Yay Gareth or something along those lines? Oh no. No.

Starting point is 00:03:21 I'm not doing Yay Gareth, I'm going, it's Gareth. I will not steal Yay Liam from Yayiam, I will never do that could do a Wilhelm scream. I could have like, I have a drive a Wilhelm drop, but I can't, I don't have my drops up. So I'm just going to, I'm disappointed you. I'm disappointed in my mother. I'm disappointing everyone right now. I think the Wilhelm scream is more of a, ah, you know, ah, yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 00:04:01 Or are you orgasming my guy? It's kind of both. I think it's both. I think it's both. I think it's both. The frightened orgasm, yeah. I think there's like a B-side Wilhelm scream that pops up every now and then. When Ben Burt was really in a good mood, he gets like the B-side Wilhelm scream out, and

Starting point is 00:04:17 that one's definitely a guy coming. What you see on the screen in front of you is a spooky empty concrete room. On the- see on the scream in front of you. It looks pretty fuckin' scary. I wouldn't like to be down here. I watched Cloverfield yesterday for the first time in like fourteen years- fifteen years since the movie came out, and I had a really embarrassing moment where I was like, well they can't go down the tracks because there's dirt rails, no, look, you're fried, me me me me me me, and I was like, well they can't go down the tracks because you're doing reals no lecture fact me me me me me

Starting point is 00:04:47 and I was like oh yeah power got knocked out to the entire city like they could probably go to the next cloverfield monster did not listen to your cinema since ding and then a year now I and I would be right to do so that movie is is I love that they were just like what if monster movie but also we kind of tried to make it a broke this is not killed James Bond moving on. It's not supposed to be like that they're supposed to be trains in here but there are not. Yeah you're telling me this is a this is this isn't scary this is depressing this image as we find out but it's scary, yeah that's true. Today we're gonna talk about Cincinnati's check out his website, cincinnatytransit.net,

Starting point is 00:05:46 and also the Cincinnati Subway History of Rapid Transit by Alan J. Singer. But before we talk about that, we have a new segment that we're gonna have for a bit, called Announcements. ALICE Yeah. The announcements begin now. Do you like the concept of seeing us in person? I hope you do. Do you live in the whims of US customs and immigration. But! Yes, we're doing an Acela Korator, if you will.

Starting point is 00:06:29 Mmm. Yeah, I also wanna float the alternate name, which my wife vetoed, which was the Four to Six Days of Sodom Tor. We will be appearing in a number of regional locations, such as New York City, Somerville, Massachusetts, which I understand is almost Boston, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Washington District of Columbia. Yes. There may be more tour dates right now, This is May 1st through 4th.

Starting point is 00:07:06 Tickets should be on sale by the time this episode airs, so all those details will be down in the description. Please purchase our tickets because the agent set us up with some really big rooms. Yeah, we've got some massive venues. We are playing some impressive places. We are going to be on Times Square in New York City, in Sony Hall. That's like 500 seats. If customs and immigration do not let me in the country to do this, I will become severely depressed. So, come and see us. Please. Come see the tour. A Broadway debut?

Starting point is 00:07:45 We've got some good episodes lined up. How could you miss it? Oh shit! Oh, we're gonna do, well there's your problem on ice, the musical Hamilton Broadway. Just kidding. I don't know if they're gonna, I don't know if the floor's gonna hold that, but we sure are gonna try. Welcome to, well there's your problem in New York City, a hip hopper.

Starting point is 00:08:03 And it's gonna be the most annoying thing you've hip hopper, and it's gonna be the most annoying thing you've ever seen. No, it's gonna be great, I cannot- It's gonna be less annoying than Hamilton. I cannot wait, and it'd be cheaper than Hamilton too. I can't wait to do this, and I hope to see you all there in person. And yeah, we're gonna be doing, like, this whole run of shows, it's gonna be absolutely fantastic, so save the

Starting point is 00:08:26 date for next summer, Summer 2025. Yes. May 1st through 4th, as of now, we may add some dates in late April if we manage to fill up again these absolutely fucking huge rooms by the tickets, please. Please, please, for fuck's sake. I also want to make a plug real quick for just point four miles from Sony Hall is audio forty six headphone superstore. So if you if you have made some sort of parasocial bond with me and want me to be happy reach out to audio. Why?

Starting point is 00:09:01 Because I keep buying headphones for them and I don't know how to stop So it's not even like you just like their product you like their store and you want them to have a little walking I want them to have a little walking around money yeah So it's not even SponCon you're just like this is a thing that I like It was the same thing with ViceNews.com and we almost had an ad deal with them until we ran into some legal issues, but that's fine I like that The Ackwood comic where one of the characters just sends Oreos money because he likes the product with that Ross that was the joke we were making that was the joke you were making oh Jesus Yeah, if you want to hear jokes, that's good buy tickets at the link in the description You can see them on a on a beautiful large stage and, if we've really fucked up here, right,

Starting point is 00:09:46 and we've booked two larger venue, you can be one of like a couple of people on a, in like a massive venue while we do bits to you personally. Exactly. If anyone watched the FIU Sam Houston State game yesterday, that would be the October 22nd. You could be the one guy in the stands who was trying to block the field goal by waving His arms real good. I Do I Do want to say we wanted to use Excel Excel a corridor, but we are terrified of running into Amtrak's lawyers Yeah, that's no legal. I don't fuck with government lawyers man. Not again I don't fuck with government lawyers, man, not again. Well, non-specific Northeast corridor...

Starting point is 00:10:30 Northeast corridor is the- oh, yo, you called the train that, that's not fuckin' trademarked, eat shit. This being the Halloween episode, it's the Northeast horror tour. Horror tour, yes. Horror tour, yes. We have a, both is Horatour, yes. We have a second announcement as well. Do we? Yeah we do.

Starting point is 00:10:49 Oh fuck, the library! The library! You know that room that you go to to learn how to read good? Well. We are hosting, with the Free Library of Philadelphia, a podcasting 101 session that will be at the main branch at the Parkway Central Library. ALICE Why did they let us do this?! LIAM I don't know.

Starting point is 00:11:10 ALICE Those who can do, those who can't teach, and brother are we teaching. We will teach you all of the, like, deep secret knowledge that you need to start a podcast. I- I- JUSTIN Yeah, we'll have podcasting demonstrations. We'll have the copy for this fucking thing is unbelievable, by the way. Oh, God. What have they said about all that? I oh, I need to see this. You should read. Roz wrote the bios.

Starting point is 00:11:36 I wrote the bio. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm I'm all type right now. I know you do. I podcasting on a one. Thursday, November 14th, 6pm, Literature Department of the Parkway Central Library, that's the one, that's the one that Ben Franklin invented and put on the Parkway, even though it hadn't been built yet. These are some great bios. Um, November Kelly is a prolific poster and podcaster and has

Starting point is 00:12:06 at one point or another made all the world's worst people extremely mad. That's nice. I like that. It's not inaccurate. So I'm just giggling at the bios. They're very good. Everyone, you should go and find that. You can find it at the free library.org calendar. With all the bios, all the information, it's all there. Go, go, go read about it. Thanks to Ross for writing those.

Starting point is 00:12:32 But yes, Thursday, November 14th. I should say this one I will not be physically present at due to the, again, U.S. customs and immigration. However, I will be there as a flat screen, which is my second favorite way of being present in a location. ALICE I do wanna say, I- tickets for this- I don't even think there's tickets for this, I think you can just show up. ALICE Yeah, it is.

Starting point is 00:12:53 LIAM I'm believing you can show up, yeah. ALICE It is free, it is open to the public, you can just arrive. So, yeah, please do that. LIAM We can't stop you, it's a public venue. ALICE I don't know if there will be jokes in this one, I think this one's just gonna be like, here's how we did this, which- There'll be jokes, but you aren't gonna like em. That's also the disclaimer for the fucking tour.

Starting point is 00:13:17 Don't, don't, don't sell us short. Have you seen our writer, which says we need the tech stack we actually need, and then also beer? Just so long as we're not doing the like, M&M's thing, you know? No. I suggested that. I vetoed it. I like the M&M's thing, cause it's like a check that they're actually reading the writer,

Starting point is 00:13:37 so that if you've got like an allergy thing they actually know it's like, I quite like the story behind the annoying M&M's thing, it's quite clever. This was just in position and then I was like, but we don't actually need them to read that much of it, we just need them to read the tech part. If you get mad at us at Sony Hall, you can walk to the M&M's New York immersive experience. That's a good point. It's like a block and a half away. Getting so mad about this, you go and get M&M's.

Starting point is 00:14:03 Those are the announcements. I didn't have a stinger for this. The goddamn news. Yeah, have you ever seen, um, have you ever seen a film called The Battle of Algiers? Fewer pixels in this image than I thought. Oh, it's drone footage. JUSTIN Israel has killed Yahya Sinwar, leader of Hamas, in a move that is sure to once and for all finally defeat Hamas. ALICE Yeah, I'm just gonna note here that every

Starting point is 00:14:38 leader of Hamas in the last, like, what, twenty years has died of being assassinated by Israel. To... JUSTIN It doesn't seem to do very much. like, what, twenty years has died off being assassinated by Israel? Um, to- It doesn't seem to do very much. Yeah, I mean, in the short term, sure, but like, as we have seen with this whole thing, like, all you're doing is creating the sort of like, groundwork for future insurgency. I was about to say, this is the just one more lane, bro, of, you know, Middle East geopolitics. Yeah, actually, whatever they- That's like one part of the overlap between this genocide and city planning, the other

Starting point is 00:15:17 is the city that they want to build on top of Gaza. Yeah, exactly. That's for a test. The situation there has definitely gotten uglier in the past couple weeks. We haven't recorded, even since they killed Nasrallah, by blowing up a whole block of apartment buildings. Which is ridiculous. Back in the early days of this conflict, the Israeli media was talking about proportional

Starting point is 00:15:44 9-11s, I don't know what that is in proportional 911s for Lebanon. Um. many. Yeah, exactly. Um, so, yeah, I highly, because the only way I have of relating to real life anymore is through movies, and because I keep seeing, like, you know, man-made horrors beyond my comprehension.

Starting point is 00:16:04 Uh, I recommend watching Battle of Algiers, also Army of Secrets, just to give you a sense of the kind of, like, my feeling about this. Again, I will say that I am depending on the federal government of the United States of America to let me into the country. So, um. Right, yeah. Oh god, can you imagine whatever fuckin' ICE agent has to listen to this shit? Uh huh, yeah.

Starting point is 00:16:32 Alright agent, here's four hundred hours of podcasts. You have until Friday. Do you think we can push the ICE agent who's detailed to listen to this left? Oh, that's a good point, we're changing the system from within. Yeah, people say to me, Nova, it's like you don't do any real activism, it's like, excuse me, I make whatever federal agent is detailed to surveil me listen to hours and hours of leftist content. If that doesn't count as activism, what does?

Starting point is 00:17:01 That's a good question. I don't even know what to say about Israel's stupid genocide anymore, y'know, cause it just looks like they're going full steam ahead with it. I do have one beef here, which is, I think this might get me accused of being defeatist, right, but I think there's this vibe that people have, especially on the left in the US and the UK, to be like, well none of this stuff actually matters, and it's like, I think you have to concede that this is what Israel winning, and what Netanyahu winning within Israel looks like, right? It sucks, it's criminal, but like, I think there's this thing, I remember this

Starting point is 00:17:42 tweet that was doing the thing recently about like, oh we've gotta build coalition with traumatized IDF soldiers, because like, really this stuff harms their interests materially too, and it's like, but it doesn't though, it might harm them in the short term, or in the longer run, but it's like, no, this is what they want to do, and they're doing it, and they're doing it successfully. And I think you can acknowledge that, and you can say, yeah, this is stuff that's going to plan for them, y'know? The kind of, oh, it hurts everybody. Maybe, I guess, but ultimately I do think you can lament that, yeah, this is shit that is being prosecuted

Starting point is 00:18:25 according to the way they want it to go. And has been very successful at that, I don't think that means that any kind of protest against it is futile or anything, but I do think that you have to acknowledge that first, you know? Yeah. I mean, absolutely. Yeah, and there does seem to have been some movement in some of the major media outlets to maybe highlight that maybe there were a few atrocities committed by Israel maybe.

Starting point is 00:18:54 Yeah, but it's just like a don't worry about that, right? Like, it always comes off to me as like, well, who can blame them, you know? And it's just like, fuck me. I can do that. ALICE You run into the like, flat denial, Isaac Chotner's latest interview for instance, or like, Danny Finkelstein on Twitter being like, well, despite this video of an Israeli drone targeting a child, an Israeli drone wouldn't target a child. So, yeah.

Starting point is 00:19:22 ALICE Oh, I saw that. If you Photoshopped that, you know? ALICE Yeah, exactly. All of these, like, x-rays of children's heads with bullets in them have been Photoshopped, because at this point you can just kind of, there's nothing left for it but to either say this is good and I like this if you're a defender of Israel, or to be like, well it's very complicated, but ultimately I'm gonna have to deny the evidence in front of me. You know?

Starting point is 00:19:49 Yeah. It's all very depressing. Yeah. Yeah. No. I just, every day I feel like I log onto Twitter and I see the worst thing that I've ever seen, and more so every day. So.

Starting point is 00:20:02 Yes. And there, I don't... Yeah, no, like I said, I don't wanna get accused of defeatism, but I don't know what the fuck I can do about it, you know? I hear you. Yeah, you know, it's, uh, speaking of things which are bad... The weather was very bad recently. Okay.

Starting point is 00:20:23 Sure. Um, you didn't wanna go with like, Appalachia destroyed then? SEAN No, no. So we had recently two hurricanes, Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. Hurricane Helene did this thing which is, y'know, kinda wacky for a hurricane to do, they don't usually do that. Yeah, which is just, y'know, take a hard left turn right before hitting Florida and just

Starting point is 00:20:52 go straight up and dump everything on western North Carolina. Yeah, get a little quirky with it and just absolutely fucking decimate the holo, sure. Yeah, exactly, goes straight for Asheville. I like Asheville, man. Yeah, Asheville's nice. I've never been, I wanna go to Asheville. We'll go to Asheville. Yeah. But the, uh, yeah, so it dumped quite a few inches of rain into, y'know, western North

Starting point is 00:21:18 Carolina, which is obviously, it's in the Appalachians, so, y'know, all of this water is concentrated into the few rivers and streams there, resulting in pretty huge flooding. I mean, this is not as unprecedented as some people made it out to be, I mean, hurricanes have done this in living memory, it's just that this usually does not happen. ALICE I mean, helpfully we had an intervention from the kind of Libs of TikTok caucus to be like, you should, if you're a patriot, you should go to North Carolina and shoot at FEMA, or whatever. Because they're trying to do deep state globalism and vaccinate your kids or whatever the fuck. The guys working 28 hour days to reopen your infrastructure should be shot at.

Starting point is 00:22:09 Yeah. I mean, so we had that and then we also had... Unauthorized helicopter flights, that was a big one, apparently there was a lot of collisions. There's a reason they gave me an RPG7, and I've been out for the last couple weeks, which is just simply to pave the way for the FEMA blackchoppers, which are coming for you and you deserve it. If Trump, when Trump wins the next election, and he does what he says he's gonna do, which is get rid of FEMA, right? And also get rid of like the weather service apparently as well like it's a dog like Rick Santorum that son of a bitch trying

Starting point is 00:22:49 to privatize the death and yeah what's that been gearing up for that one for a while yeah also a quick quick and quick interjection on my introduction which is it's based that one of the NASA like not NASA NASA so, what are they? NASA guys, no, what are they called? NOAA. N-O-A-A, yeah. Yes, NOAA. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. One of the, so in the eye of one of the storms, or on the edge of the eye, they tossed out

Starting point is 00:23:16 the ashes of one of their dead former colleagues, presumably someone who was at long retard and stuff, but that guy's wish was, I'll chuck my ashes into a hurricane while you're working your way through it. So that's, that's based. Anyway, that's an interjection. So when they go, when FEMA, NOAA, all these services go, and then there's the next one of these comes along, which by the way, it will be happening with increasing frequency until our civilization collapses. What do you think happens? Yes, what happens? I suppose they just... Oh, um, wipe your ass with the corpses of your friends.

Starting point is 00:23:53 All of the like, Black Rifle Coffee Company kind of patriots, uh, organize in community with each other, and definitely don't devolve into weird paranoid little cabals, and start shooting at each other. That feels... We don't, not to, like, kick anarchists in the teeth for no reason here, but to be like, yeah, in year 2024 to be like, nah, we don't need a, like, state capacity for any of this shit. Nah, it'll be fine.

Starting point is 00:24:19 It'll be fine. Um. Yeah. We're gonna actually, we're gonna trust some guys on motorcycles with the horse trailer to go raid the grocery store and then distribute the food. I mean, if you want to kind of- Possibly hoard it.

Starting point is 00:24:31 Anarchist critique of that, it's like, interesting, so you would rather be paying the cops to guard the empty grocery store and its groceries from people. But like, equally to this in Appalachia, we also had the Florida hurricane that Caroline Calloway survived which... Unfortunately. Yeah, X in the chat. Hurricane Milton was more recent, that was bearing down on Tampa Bay, the Tampa Bay area has always been uniquely positioned to be completely destroyed by a hurricane, and once

Starting point is 00:25:06 again the hurricane got near Tampa Bay, and the giant atmospheric pinball bumper went boop! And just veered off at the last second. There is a special providence that protects children, drunks, and the United States of America, um, and- Brackets Tampa Bay. Yes, yeah, the most United States of America bit of the United States of America, and- ALICE And brackets Tampa Bay. ALICE Yes, yeah, the most United States of America bit of the United States of America, I sort of believe that.

Starting point is 00:25:30 And yeah, influencer and scammer Caroline Calloway tanked a hurricane in her apartment building, which is Beachfront and Sarasota. And yeah, this was, I remember this one chiefly as being a kind of like empire of social media grifts, like guys trying to win money off of streamers by riding the hurricane out in like a sort of paddle boat or whatever the fuck. A lot of people misunderstanding how storm surge works, cause Tampa Bay got a negative storm surge, and everyone assumed that meant a tsunami was gonna wipe it out. No, the water just sort of gently flooded back in, eventually.

Starting point is 00:26:10 ALICE I think the best thing we can say here is to do our PSA, which is do not touch the poop, right? Flood water. Flood water is mostly full of sewage, and god knows what else, don't fuck around in it, because you will get very sick. Follow evacuation orders, even if you are convinced of God's providence for Tampa Bay, I would still not ride out the storm in a boat. Yeah, you do as the FEMA black helicopters tell you, you know?

Starting point is 00:26:42 You guys see Cloverfield, right? Like, I will say, uh, the, the only time I'll ever say it, uh, God bless the Tampa Bay light. That's it. That's all you get. I, I, I, I don't know, man. I, I it's, it's sort of horrifying, right? To, with the, the private helicopter flights being, you know what they are. People say, oh, the, I just, the weird. So when are, people saying, oh the, just, the, we're, so when we're recording this we are, what, 13 days from the election in the United States. Oh god is it that little cross?

Starting point is 00:27:14 Jesus. And this is how they're campaigning? What the fuck? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, I just- No one's seen Kamalaala Harris Trump is having PTSD meltdowns. This is the lowest energy. It's like looking at the end of an ultra marathon

Starting point is 00:27:31 where like two guys were 90% blister like stumble across the finish line. What the fuck? You're not wrong. And I just I just I don't know. I just wanted to just like express my frustrations that we can't fucking do shit in this country. ALICE I genuinely, how does it feel like Joe Biden would have more energy than this? Like... ALICE Because the Labour Party got involved, and so they told them to switch off all that energy and make it disappear.

Starting point is 00:28:00 JUSTIN I will say that there is a terrific image of Joe Biden, and I think DeSantis in Florida, and Joe Biden is talking to people who had survived a storm, and the man he's talking to is wearing a shirt that just says like, cracker on it, and Rob DeSantis is like pouting to the side. Magnificent. And it's a great picture. I have one correction to make, which is it's the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, I regret the error or whatever.

Starting point is 00:28:28 And also, if you're ever interested in signing up for USAA, and you served in the NOAA uniformed corps, which is a real thing that exists, you can sneak in to USAA through the backdoor doing that. Nice. Plus they have the coolest combination of uniforms, it's like Navy Dress Blues and Coast Guard Working Uniform, so. Yeah. We love our coasties here.

Starting point is 00:28:53 We love militarizing our public services sometimes. Yeah. Sometimes. I think the Commissioned Officer Corps of Noah's is pretty interesting. Yeah, for sure, same as the public health corps. Like, it's, yeah. Right, yeah. You can, that's how you sneak into USA through the back door.

Starting point is 00:29:09 You're just like, yeah, I served in a, in a, uh... Yeah, and as, as, as someone who likes, uh, likes a uniform, you know, I, I think that maybe we should do more bureaucrat uniforms, you know? I think that could be cool. Um... I wonder if there's a nation who gave us a model for what that might look like. If only I had a drop of that nation's national anthem with which to end the news segment. We could have the navy in charge of the railroads for some reason.

Starting point is 00:29:39 Oh god. Oh no. Hey, we're all still alive. Anyway, that was the goddamn news brackets spooky You see prime me with news and I just cut off whatever you say after that Anyway, here's something spooky that's right folks. It's Cincinnati. Yeah It's Cincinnati the Queen City, right? I mean, I don't know if you can be saying that, if it says that, white boy, but like, uh, sure.

Starting point is 00:30:15 There we are. Liam's done. He's done. Woo! Cincinnati, it's a city, it's on the Ohio River system, right? It was incorporated in 1819. Lots of German immigrants immigrated in the 1840s that coincided with the opening of the Bi-Amy and Erie Canal, which we're going to talk about later. That's why I was going to...

Starting point is 00:30:39 Because Erie. There is something of that. That's good. Erie. Yeah, no, that was good. There is something of the Rhineland about the way they've built this city. That's four very fetching bridges we can see in this little postcard. America's Cologne. Yeah. Or Dusseldorf. Let's go Dusseldorf actually.

Starting point is 00:30:56 You know, we'll talk more about this later, but the Miami and Erie Canal was actually referenced by the German immigrants. They just jokingly called it the Rhine, and then there's a neighborhood that was past the canal, it's still there, called Over the Rhine. Which is a beautiful neighborhood. Troubling how many Americans are just crypto-Germans. I completely agree.

Starting point is 00:31:19 And I will have my revenge in this life of the night. Like many towns on the Ohio River, it's built entirely on a floodplain and it's extremely hemmed in by hills. Nonetheless, the city grew very, very rapidly. 115,000 people by 1850, making it one of the largest cities in the country. It was a major stop on the Underground Railroad because, you know, it's full of Germans and most of the Germans did not like slavery, and it was just north of the Mason-Dixon line. On the other side of the river here, that's Covington, Kentucky.

Starting point is 00:31:55 That's where those horrible teenagers are from, from a couple years ago. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember, sure. Yeah, from the fake Catholic school. Yeah. Quote-unquote Catholic., from the fake Catholic school. Yeah. Quote unquote Catholic. Quote unquote school. Yeah, the trajectory of American Catholicism.

Starting point is 00:32:13 That sounds like a bonus episode, to be honest. We already did Protestantism. We're doing Catholicism, I have it outlined somewhere. Set of vacantists are just Protestants. Yeah, I'm sorry. We know. Dude, a lot of American Catholics are just- well no, trad cats. Not American Catholics necessarily, but trad cats are just Protestants.

Starting point is 00:32:31 You wanna be a prod so fucking bad. And you deserve the same fate that- no, no, no. Car bombing. Car bombing. Although I will say that like, I think- Shamus, the fertilizer. Much of this is on the American church itself, and it's like, the whole fucking, like, ecclesiastical hierarchy has positioned itself this way on purpose to try and make those people like that. But anyway.

Starting point is 00:32:58 Yeah. They got the Robling Suspension Bridge in 1866, this thing was absolutely massive for its time. Roblox Suspension Bridge. This thing was absolutely massive for its time. It's still there. Roblox suspension bridge. It's gorgeous. I like it. It is very pretty. Yeah, well, we need a better picture of it, but yeah, it is very pretty. Electric streetcars were introduced in 1889. They got lots of fantastic Italianate architecture. They got this really cool music hall, but the big thing they have in Cincinnati is hills. The Bengals?

Starting point is 00:33:28 Oooh. It's the Midwest's Pittsburgh, kind of. It is. Cincinnati is a kind of Pittsburgh, I would say. Are you able to do the fucking insane Pittsburgh top or not about the hills, I'm sorry. He always does this! I'm sorry for betraying Philadelphia by knowing about this. Also, Sinternati, named for Sincinitus, or Kinkinitus, the Roman briefly dictator statesman

Starting point is 00:34:01 who famously gave up power to go back to his plow. Yeah, he seized absolute power as dictator, and then when he did what he had to do he was like, alright, I'm gonna go back to the farm now. Yeah. It's how the system of dictatorship was supposed to work as an emergency powers thing. Washington got compared to him a lot, there was a weird quasi-illuminati thing called the Society of the Sincinitas. Yeah, the Sincinitas, yes.

Starting point is 00:34:29 Still around, I think. Yeah, they were real weird, there was a fear that they were gonna be a, sort of a, oh god, like an inheritance base, like, that's how power would work in the new United States. Yeah. They did the sort of anti-Masonic stuff, with all the no-nothings. I mean, the thing is, it always interests me how, in early American history, how close, on a number of occasions, the US got to having a king. Like, Constitution or no, it was within spitting distance a few times, and like, fucking Tyler, James Tyler, was like, definitely had some, like, kingly pretensions.

Starting point is 00:35:06 As did Richard Nixon, wait, I don't have... Anyway. Yeah, John Adams did not do an especially great job in the framing with that stuff. I do recommend, I believe it's McCullough's biography of John Adams, or you can just watch the miniseries with, oh god, not with this fucking name, Paul Giamatti, which is actually pretty good. Ooh. Noted. It was called Billions.

Starting point is 00:35:30 It was not called Billions. You asshole. Yeah, Paul Giamatti had a powdered wig with like a French quarter and walking over his back. You guys saw Sideways, right? Alright, let's do this. So, wait, wait, wait, Ross, Ross, we cannot move past-, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait,

Starting point is 00:35:48 wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, This is a P-Way for P-Way. Yes, exactly. Did we do this whole episode for me? Now I'm happy. Okay, everyone's forgiven.

Starting point is 00:36:07 I'm happy now. We're going to have, we're going to have, we're going to talk about some, some train shit here in a moment. My career in life. Some weird train shit. My career in life. We're going to try and break the not a metro chart. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:36:22 So, there's lots of hills in Cincinnati. That means it's unable to sprawl like a st. Louis or a Chicago So it built up they got really dense really fast It eventually lost out to other major cities due to the topology You know the gateway to the West turns out to be st. Louis and not Cincinnati Because it's location naturally restricts locations of things like railroad yards large factories They tried to build a harbor. It didn't work You know and the question was okay. How do you solve this? There's a lot of flat land just past the hills They tried getting out there using electric streetcars to getting over the hill is very difficult

Starting point is 00:37:01 There were a number of inclines like this one In Cincinnati which were built to take the streetcar over the hill is very difficult. There were a number of inclines like this one in Cincinnati which were built to take the streetcar over the hill. ALICE extremely cool. LIAM Yeah. ALICE Also just nice. Like, Topography makes a nice city, and like, I know lots of US cities don't exploit Topography because they just needed to get real quick. ALICE Well, sorry, I have one note here which is that I'm doing flat viewings at the moment,

Starting point is 00:37:26 and if you've had to walk up Gardner Street, or down Gardner Street, in the west end of Glasgow when it is covered in wet leaves, you take your life in your fucking hands. You will be killed. Yes. You will be killed. Yeah, yeah, that's fair. Probably should have installed a funicular. I mean, honestly, true. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:37:45 SEAN I probably used to have a funicular, and they got rid of it, just like this one they got rid of. ALICE Fucking ski slope. SEAN Yeah. ALICE I've genuinely fallen on my ass walking down the hill from the uni before, so... ALICE Brutal. SEAN Mmhm.

Starting point is 00:37:59 Yeah. Worse is because, like, because it was next to the uni, teens saw me and laughed. SEAN Augh. ALICE It's over. SEAN That is worse than death. ALICE At that point. You're just like, I wish I'd hit my head. I wish I were dead, yeah, now I hear you. Now the other thing you could use if electric streetcars weren't enough to get farther into the flatter areas north of the city, was this wonderful technology called the Interurban.

Starting point is 00:38:21 Yay! It's the era of those oh yeah Hi miles miles What is an inner urban is generally speaking? Oh, I had a smart-ass answer, but no go ahead Oh, no, I have the smart ass answer and I'm in a graphic form He's really I'm enjoying myself graphic form. I like the little chuckle there. Generally speaking, we're talking about a lightly built electric railroad that runs between urban areas and runs on streets within

Starting point is 00:38:53 urban areas. They focused mainly on passenger service and used essentially what were larger and faster street cars. Yeah, they're really cool. I really like them. Oh yeah. I love me a good interurban. Every rule has an exception, and on interurbans, exceptions were the rule. Their main unifying characteristic is that all of them are weird. The purpose of these things is to try and break Gareth's Metro flowchart. Yes. Precisely.

Starting point is 00:39:23 Because they're all trams actually, but let's see what happens. Uh-huh. So here's a few examples. This is Washington and Old Dominion Railroad number 26. They built this thing from scratch out of a boxcar, which I think is funny. Holes. Oh yeah. This ran from Alexandria out to Bluefield, Virginia, that's something like 78 miles, I think. What?! That's some miles. In a streetcar.

Starting point is 00:39:51 Yeah, and here's the, um, the Westchester Traction Company here. This is the 104 trolley that ran out to Westchester, Pennsylvania, from 69th Street Terminal in Upper Darby. Nice. Pennsylvania, from 69th Street Terminal in Upper Derby. We can see here on sort of this crappy grass track adjacent to the Westchester Pike, which was considerably smaller back then. They still went very fast, the track was just not good. ALICE This thing is screaming along on grass track an inch away from your Ford Model T.

Starting point is 00:40:22 ALICE Yeah. ALICE And it will win. Here we have the Chicago, Aurora and Elgin, which is sort of the reverse of that, extremely high quality right away, powered by third rail as opposed to overhead line. The schedule on this interurban was still faster than driving the same distances today.

Starting point is 00:40:44 Oh my God, why did we return with a V also? Wait, do you, do you guys say Elgin rather than Elgin? Interesting. I know. So yes, you'll be right how to pronounce anything. It's always funny. Yeah. Because, uh, Elgin is definitely Elgin, but, uh, yeah, maybe the Scots who came over on

Starting point is 00:41:00 the boat got lost because that when the Scottish people sent people over the Atlantic, we had a habit of sinking those ships. So, uh so that's fair. Anyway, sorry, I digress. From the nation that brought you Cairo, Illinois. Yeah. This particular- Versailles, Pennsylvania. Versailles, Pennsylvania. That's a good one. Or Bryn Mawr.

Starting point is 00:41:19 This particular inner urban- Which also worries me. I think the CAA and E will be a future episode This was infamously after they started to lose money because part of the tracks were relocated to build a highway then much slower They were actually the the the They actually abandoned the passenger service with no notice at noon on July 3rd 1957 and a bunch of people who were waiting for the train that afternoon got a nasty surprise. ALICE You can't get home now.

Starting point is 00:41:52 Sorry. But without the sorry bit. Yeah, exactly. ALICE Yeah, we apologize to passengers for the inconvenience, but this is now a buy a car replacement service. Exactly. Uh, most famously, probably the Pacific Electric here, as seen in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. You know, the cars we're showing here are the blimp cars. Why are they called blimps?

Starting point is 00:42:18 The answer is because- Oh, we're supposed to do an answer to that. No, I don't- I have no idea why. No, I have no idea. Much like blimps, they're fucking huge. Do not body shame these cars. They're bigger than some mainline passenger train cars, right? You know, they would just run three of them coupled together in the street in mixed traffic

Starting point is 00:42:38 with cars. This is the proper way things should be, is that the train should be the natural apex predator and cars should be afraid of it. Absolutely. And if you, yeah, none of the situation where a tram, like, when the Sheffield Tram got extended and like, just the day of the, like the day, all the press people had just gone home and then the first tram just crashed into a car on a level crossing. It's like, well not a level crossing, just where it, it's just like, no, the car should always lose. They should always. Look at those videos

Starting point is 00:43:09 of like Weymouth when the, when the trains, like they just had full size, like class 37s going round, like going round the corners on, on the tram track that was the main line railway that went to the harbor. And, and yeah, if people got their cars in the way, the 37 would just shunt it out of the way. No bother. Bring that back. ALICE and JUSTIN laugh ALICE Uh, Inner Urban's also handled freight.

Starting point is 00:43:31 Here's this very small but extremely mighty box cab on the Waterloo, Cedar Falls and Northern. JUSTIN I love everything about that image. It's a gorgeous image. Lovely black and white. And the image is stunning. The infrastructure is stunning, the infrastructure is stunning. That bridge is beautiful, low arch, aw, just gorgeous, absolutely fantastic.

Starting point is 00:43:52 ALICE You know the thing that makes me angriest about this is that this is a weird real image that only, the thin red line of, like, FOMA autism is holding back the tide of, like, AI-generated slop that's just convincingly enough weird train stuff, from, like, swamping this, y'know? ALICE Yeah, we will never, like, in a year's time we will simply not be able to find any of these images on the internet ever again. RILEY It's definitely become more difficult in this line of work to find specific images of things I've watched, you know? Fucking gross.

Starting point is 00:44:32 Stop making me a seven wheel streamliner, just show me the real streamliners. Thank you. Here's a fun one, the Iowa Traction Railroad, this is inexplicably still operating. Wait, what? Here's a fun one, the Iowa Traction Railroad, this is inexplicably still operating. ALICE & LIAM Wait, what? ALICE Most of the equipment is 90 years old. ALICE Amazing. LIAM They did this incredible thing back in the 1970s or 80s, which most railroads did

Starting point is 00:44:58 not and still don't want to do, which is purchasing an adequate amount of rolling stock for your customers. Absolutely remarkable. We can't do it in the UK. 90 year old railways still transport passengers the old fashioned way. Yeah. Well, they got rid of the passenger service, unfortunately, but I think they still do fan trips. But this is in the middle of nowhere. All they do is interchange with Union Pacific, I think. But they still are using the old electric engines. I think one of these is a old Washington, an old Dominion engine, actually. Wowzer. And then how weird could they get? We'll look at the Electro Liner in Chicago and

Starting point is 00:45:35 Milwaukee on the Chicago North Shore line. Gorgeous. Yeah. This is a high speed interurban. It starts in Milwaukee on the trolley tracks, right, making local stops, then it would go south onto its own dedicated high speed right away, go 80 miles an hour all the way to Chicago, where they would then put it on the Chicago L and make local stops in the loop itself. Absolutely incredible. And, for good measure, the same company also ran freight trains on the L. Amazing. Of course they did. Oh my god, I love- So this is just like, local merchandise, but eventually, they also handled carloads.

Starting point is 00:46:19 This is actually, uh, when eventually the Chicago Transit Authority took over, and they kept running freight trains. Until April 1973. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah. These are full-size, you know, mainline coal cars here. You're just commuting and like, the coal train goes past you.

Starting point is 00:46:39 Yes. Quite literally. Amazing. Wow. On the express tracks too. Mmm. It's like, covered in coal dust. Amazing. Wow. On the express tracks, too. It's like covered in coal dust. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:46:49 Well, it's main, the main customers towards the end were several commercial coal dealerships. Back when we had those in the middle of cities. Yeah, exactly. Um, alright, so where does an interurban fit on the not a metro chart? And secondary question, does the interurban then retroactively make a metro into not a metro? I feel like I'm watching two chess grandmasters playing here. I know, right, literally unrolling the scroll, the sacred scroll onto the table and Roz and

Starting point is 00:47:24 I are sat on either side of it. Oooh. Now, so all of those are trams. But, does- ALICE The people were astonished at his doctrine. JUSTIN Does the Chicago L then become a tram, because it shares tracks with trams. ALICE Yes. And it would even, because it ran freight on it, it also gets broken, so the fact that

Starting point is 00:47:51 it isn't fully segregated means it isn't a metro, it's heavy suburban rail. So yeah, it's broken not only as the interurban tram, but it has also un-metro-ified the Chicago L. Yeah. Wow. They just took the Metro right off of it? Like a Lego brick separator? Yes. Yep. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:48:15 That's it. It doesn't mean that it's not good. Trams can be good. I would love to know what the capacities, like when they were fully running, I'd love to know what their actual like passengers per hour, per direction system capacities were because I bet some of those were hauling people. Some of those were definitely moving lots and lots and lots of people. And then other ones were like, yeah, we run four trains a day.

Starting point is 00:48:38 And you'll be grateful. You'll be grateful for it, yeah. Like the blimps must have, those blimps, what, three car and each car massive, so they're potentially 120 people in a car. So those are big. And if they're running them frequently, then you might start tapping on the door of some seriously high capacity. You might start reaching the point where you're competing with Budapest in terms of the heavy tram title, which doesn't get, to be honest, there's only like one system in the world that hits the heavy tram button. So yeah, maybe they're heavy trams sometimes when they're really good. Yeah, I'd definitely say if you, some of those systems would be running like a huge train

Starting point is 00:49:17 like that every like two and a half minutes. Oh, big, okay, heavy tram then. I like like that heavy tram. There we go. So heavy tram heavy tram Yeah, that's it. So I have it is which means I can do my vocals for I can really fry out my vocals down this mic today So in Cincinnati there were several Interurban lines that sort of converged on the city, but they could not enter it.

Starting point is 00:49:48 This is due to a classic problem, the break of gauge. Oh, for God's sake. Okay. Yep. Because Cincinnati's street railways were built to Pennsylvania trolley gauge, right? That's right, baby. Pennsylvania dominance. That's...

Starting point is 00:50:02 I'm surprised that we just clipped that. I'm just gonna limit to Pennsylvania dominance!" That's... I'm surprised you could just clip that. I'm just gonna limit to Pennsylvania dominance. Yeah, that's it. I just won that as a drop. Just Liam shouting, that's right, Baby Pennsylvania dominance. Thank you. Thank you. So that's five feet two and a half inches between the rails, which is about six inches

Starting point is 00:50:23 wider than standard gauge. This was chosen for two reasons, right? One was supposedly to make more room for horses between the rails when the system opened and it was using horse cars. Oh, the reverse horse ass theory. Yes. Yes, turns out actually you need a little bit more room, the horses got fatter. Poor monsters. Turns out, actually need a little bit more room. The horses got fatter. Uh, poor amongst us.

Starting point is 00:50:46 Yeah. Uh, the other reason was to prevent steam railroads from easily acquiring the horse car lines and subsequently running steam trains in the middle of the street in residential neighborhoods. Uh, that old chestnut. Okay, fair. Yeah. So, your interurban lines faced no such qualms, and so with only a few exceptions they were

Starting point is 00:51:09 all built to standard gauge. There were a couple of small lines radiating out from the city that were built to Pennsylvania trolley gauge, but they were the exception. You know, your interurban needed to be standard gauge because they interchanged freight with the steam railroads, and they interchanged, y'know, passenger cars with each other a lot of the times. ALICE Sorry, I was just gonna hand out a glass of wine here, are we still on the horse's arse thing? LIAM Hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe Hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe Hehehehehe Hehehehehe Hehehe Hehehe Hehehe Hehehe Hehehe Hehehe Hehehe Hehehe Hehehe Hehehe Hehehe Hehehe Hehehe He Hehehe He Hehehe He Hehehe He Hehehe He Hehehe He Hehehe He Hehehe He Hehehe He Hehehe He Hehehe He Hehehe He Hehehe He Hehehe He He Hehehe He He Hehehe He He Hehehe He He He Hehehe He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He He and the reason why they are all standard gauge. And getting sad. And getting sad, yeah. We're still sad. We're still sad.

Starting point is 00:51:46 Are we experiencing Halloween in the form of hauntology, then? Mmhm. Oh, you betcha. So the interurban system in Ohio is massive, right? I could ride a train, a local interurban, all the way from Cleveland to Toledo, and then down to Dayton and to Cincinnati. ALICE Uh, a better world was possible.

Starting point is 00:52:09 RILEY That's all on fast electric trains, or at least electric trains. Not necessarily fast. ALICE Why can't we build high speed rail in this country? And the answer is, we built moderate speed rail in this country. RILEY And then dismantled it. RILEY Two things strike me here.

Starting point is 00:52:25 Number one, if this was still around, this would be the equivalent of people who do hilarious long distance journeys on local buses only in the UK, which I love. I love that content. I want more of it always. It's great. The second thing that strikes me, because of the predominance of interurbans and their demise, it feels like what, so I, I watch a lot of Air Crash Investigation because I think it's a fun show, May Day for those

Starting point is 00:52:49 in the North America hype. And one of the things that always angers me on the North America episodes is why are their flights between there and there, they are like a half hour train away from each other. That always angers me. And I guess lots of those places had interurbans rather than other railroads. They also had interurbans that did and could still be excellent. Jon Moffitts Ohio is particularly egregious when it comes to passenger rail at this particular time because there's only two M-Trac trains that go through Ohio and they both make stops at like 2 o'clock in the morning.

Starting point is 00:53:27 I was going to say, there's like three trains to Cincinnati a week and they all arrive at 1 a.m. and that horrifies me. Yes. Nothing to Columbus. Cleveland is also served at 2 o'clock in the morning or so, both ways. It's like, well done Cincinnati, you have like a tenth of the number of trains as Dovey Junction in West Wales that has a population of zero. Just absolutely spectacular work. So if you were taking the inner urban, you couldn't get into Cincinnati proper, you actually had to stop and disembark at the edge of the city and get on a slower local trolley, that's the change of gauge, right? ALICE Uh huh.

Starting point is 00:54:13 Because of Pennsylvania excellence. JUSTIN Yes. And then you were stuck in traffic for an hour to get into the city. ALICE That's the price of Pennsylvania excellence. LIAM That's to get. ALICE Ah, it's because they haven't invented bustlins yet. ALICE The strong brackets Philadelphia do as they will, and the weak brackets Cincinnati suffer as they must.

Starting point is 00:54:33 SEAN Well, I, y'know, I was, they deserve it, right? That's what you, you should've just remained Extendo Pennsylvania. Or whatever, Extendo, Connecticut, technically. Yeah, exactly. You're going to chop off a bit for the Connecticut Western Reserve. Now, another problem Cincinnati had was, you know, a lot of this railroad construction had made redundant the smelly and gross and unsanitary Miami and Erie Canal that ran through the center of the city. Didn't this catch fire at one point? Probably.

Starting point is 00:55:08 No, you're thinking of the Cuyahoga in Cleveland. Uh, okay. Sorry, sorry, I fucked up my post-industrial Midwestern cities. This is, this is named for the Miami River, which it paralleled for much of its length, it actually goes right up the side of Ohio, the way to the area, Lake Erie. You know, there's no, there's actually no connection between the Miami River and Miami, Florida, despite the fact they're both derived from Native American place names. Huh.

Starting point is 00:55:39 Yeah, it's weird. That is weird. I'm going to be thinking about that for a little while. Locals again, they sort of refer to it as the Rhine, that's why the Over the Rhine neighborhood is up here. In 1913, a major flood finally took the canal out of service for good, and there was suddenly this major right of way available to get straight to downtown Cincinnati. ALICE Miami, it turns out, means big water, which fits for both, you know?

Starting point is 00:56:10 Yeah. Yep. That'll do it. LIAM The Great Miami River is actually very small. ALICE That's really sad. So Miami is one of only ten words surviving, recorded from the language of the now extinct Miami people. JUSTIN Hmm. Oh yeah, they got them pretty early on in Florida, yeah.

Starting point is 00:56:34 ALICE Yeah. ALICE So, here's the idea. The city fathers think, why don't we kill three birds with one stone, right? LIAM Aw, you got too many birds there. That's getting gritty. ALICE Fighting off more than you can chew, yeah. three birds with one stone, right? Ah, you got too many birds there. That's getting gritty. That's getting gritty. Biting off more than you can chew, yeah. We're gonna replace that dirty old canal with a public private subway for use by rapid transit trains and interurbans, possibly even freight service as well.

Starting point is 00:56:58 What a concept. And then we're gonna put a beautiful urban boulevard on top. Oh boy. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah, perfect Yeah, it's like cut and cover except you don't have to do any cutting. You don't have to do the cutting Yeah, it's a picture that later cover The idea for a subway in the canal bed had been around since the 1880s But back then they were still thinking well, we got to run steam locomotives in there

Starting point is 00:57:21 I don't sure that works that only works in London Excellent baby Well you gotta run steam locomotives in there, I don't think that works. That only works in London. Let's not talk about that. ALICE & LIAM Laughing. London excellence, baby! It's like Pennsylvania, but it's better. Oh god. No, no, no, it's not. Well I just think Connecticut has new London. Yeah, and it sucks, Ross.

Starting point is 00:57:32 Yeah, but it's so good, why'd they have to build a new one? Don't ask about New Philadelphia. You're gonna be laughing out the other side of, why'd they have to build a new one? Don't ask about New Philadelphia. Yeah, you're gonna be laughing out the other side of your face when there's a New Pennsylvania on Mars or whatever. There's a New Philadelphia in Ohio. There is.

Starting point is 00:57:56 Yeah. Is it any good? No. It's what happens when you lose your save game for original Philadelphia and you're like, okay, so I just move to a new tile on the SimCity 4 map. Philadelphia underscore real final final real yeah. Dash copy. Yep. The city keeps growing due to the topography it's going up and not outward. This was back when urban density was a bad thing and Cincinnati had a lot of density. Only parts of Manhattan were, like, similarly as dense as Cincinnati was.

Starting point is 00:58:30 ALICE That's, like, hauntology to be in, like, downtown Cincinnati and be like, this is, like, Mega City 1 of the late 1890s, to be like, this is the most density anywhere on earth, it's like fucking Kowloon Walled City. JUSTIN You're in a Warhammer Hive city, yeah. Called Cincinnati. So, Henry Thomas Hunt is elected mayor in 1912 on a platform of abolishing the corrupt Republican machine that ran the city.

Starting point is 00:59:04 ALICE Yeah, this is why Cincinnati's a shit tier city, it's because they had a corrupt Republican machine insteadishing the corrupt Republican machine that ran the city. ALICE Yeah, this is why sentinels is a shit tier city, it's because they had a corrupt Republican machine instead of a corrupt Democratic machine. JUSTIN Yeah, and also they got rid of it, y'know, I think sometimes these machines did less bad than people think. ALICE You should listen to a podcast called No Gods No Mayors, which will cover some of this very shortly. podcast called No Gods, No Mayors, which will cover some of this very shortly. Um, yeah, I, also, I really am having a sort of hauntological moment of like, you will never be in downtown Cincinnati in like, 1912. You know?

Starting point is 00:59:36 ALICE Yes. RILEY Can you imagine? ALICE Oh, god. RILEY Yeah, I just, these are moments I enjoy on other podcasts that are available to listen to as well kill James Bombay one where where it's like footage of like Tokyo in 1981 and it's just such a vibe that You can't jump in the same river twice you can barely jump jump in the same river once you will never be you'll never step out

Starting point is 01:00:00 of like a like bar in Cincinnati in like 1910 almost get hit by an interurb and going 80 miles an hour down the middle of the street. And look up at every building, it's like 100 meters tall. Yeah. God. It's, it's something. So, Cincinnati, the government was corrupt, and it was broke.

Starting point is 01:00:22 And it was broke because it was corrupt. That's what's new. That's what's most kinds of corrupt. JUSTIN Yeah. SEAN Henry Topp is hot managed in a very short period of time to implement very basic but effective reforms, such as actually collecting taxes. ALICE Yeah, he was one term. SEAN He also spearheaded a serious effort to build the subway. He convinced the state

Starting point is 01:00:48 to lease the canal to the city and set up a committee, the Rapid Transit Committee, to actually plan the damn thing. Several features were planned. There'd be a downtown circulator route shown here. There'd be a huge freight terminal right behind Cincinnati Music Hall. That wouldn't fuck with the music at all. Sounds of boxcars slamming into each other. There'd be a beautiful new boulevard on top of the whole thing. Fine, nice.

Starting point is 01:01:22 Don't put cars on there of course, Just leave it as a nice green park. Nope. No, they're not gonna do that. Oh, okay, nevermind. JUSTIN This thing was heavily based on the Cambridge-Dorchester subway. ALICE Oh, okay. I'm... I'm...

Starting point is 01:01:37 JUSTIN In various municipalities around Boston. ALICE I am now fascinated by Cincinnati. I wish to go to Cincinnati and like, absorb its local history. Dear United States Customs and Immigration, uh, please, I am normal and can be trusted with entering the United States, I'm sorry I called it the United Snakes of America c-c-earlier. That's just, uh, speaking Maoist standard English. Yeah, bilingual. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:02:01 We're all very proud of you. So the Cambridge Dot subway is extremely large. The cars were very large for their day. These are ten feet wide, seventy foot long cars. Those were larger than some contemporary mainline passenger cars. Hell yeah. The city also planned to ban steam trains in the tunnel except for emergencies, and what an emergency is is left as an exercise to the reader. They included quite a lot of ventilation.

Starting point is 01:02:36 But yeah, if you want to see what this subway looks like, go to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and that's essentially the same design. You know what I was gonna say, you know what you could do while you're in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and that's essentially the same design. You know what I was gonna say, you know what you could do while you're in Cambridge, Massachusetts is you could come to Somerville, Massachusetts on May the... first, I think? And you could see us. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Starting point is 01:02:58 So there were a few schemes that were developed. Love a scheme. Love a scheme. Love a scheme. Oh, and Roman numerals as well, just to make them seem even more sinister. There was Scheme 1, Scheme 1 is just the area outside the downtown loop. There was Scheme 2, where they built a loop downtown, these sorts of distribution loops were very popular in sort of the pre-war subways.

Starting point is 01:03:20 They also didn't work very well, but they didn't figure that out for a long time. Yeah, I mean, many is not very intuitive sometimes. JUSTIN Yeah. Scheme two just has it do this little dogleg into downtown. Scheme three here- ALICE Yeah, that's actually better. Dogleg is better from a design perspective, for sure. JUSTIN Scheme three here had it go down- ALICE Was that God inventing the dog?

Starting point is 01:03:42 JUSTIN Yeah. down- ALICE God inventing the dog. JUSTIN Liam, trying to answer your question. Loops are a nightmare operationally, they're just very very annoying. It's actually better operationally and for capacity to just have a continuous line, even if it does weird shapes. It's better to just have a single line. JUSTIN All the trains get in each other's way. ALICE Exactly, yeah. JUSTIN Sometimes they get in their own way.

Starting point is 01:04:07 Scheme four is this sort of, they do a straighter line through downtown and then come out the bottom near the waterfront as an elevated rail system. Oh, interesting. Quite a lot further south coming to the other end, so there's quite a massive variation in where it ends up to the, I'm going to say to the right of these aerials, I don't know what north is but I guess north is the top. North is roughly this way. Now there's more outside of this area where it goes out into the suburbs.

Starting point is 01:04:38 Okay yeah. This I suppose on that, did it for this, this is not hugely pertinent, was it just taking some of the interurbans at that point? Was it kind was it just taking some of the interurbans at that point? Was it kind of occupying the space of the interurbans at that point? Yeah, we'll see that in the next slide. Okay, okay, yep. So there's a six million dollar bond issue for constructing the subway. This passes with a six to one ratio at the ballot box in 1916.

Starting point is 01:05:01 I mean, 1916, you know, America hasn't even entered the war yet, you're like, everything is fine here in, like, the densest city in the world, and the way of the future, Cincinnati, Ohio. Everything is gonna be fine forever, it's gonna be the American Century, I would love to- I think that's gonna happen. Yeah, I would love to do some trains. This was not enough money to pay for the whole thing, but this is gonna be the sort of public-private

Starting point is 01:05:28 partnership, remember? The city was gonna construct the tunnels, and grade the rights of way where it was above ground, and the Cincinnati Street Railway, which was the local monopoly on the street cars, would lease the tunnels and operate them and install the tracks and so on and so forth. ALICE So administratively this is a tram? SEAN Uh, essentially, yeah. ALICE Just putting a line in the sand there, so the really complicated bit, the public

Starting point is 01:06:00 are gonna take that on, right? So the public are gonna take liability for the expensive, complicated, heavy civil engineering. And then these little, the private company Chucklefucks can come in and they, all they have to do is put the tracks down and run trains through. Okay, I'm just going to take note of that. That feels important. Yes. Yes. So alright, here's like the fuller system zoomed out a bit. You can see we have the sort of dogleg down here. You can also see these green lines radiating off are various interurbans that connect to

Starting point is 01:06:33 the subway. The parts in red are tunnels, the parts in blue are surface or elevated tracks. But this is going to sort of form a big loop on the outside And then all these interurbans are gonna feed into it, and they're all gonna go directly downtown as express trains Sure, okay So there's pretty quickly a legal roadblock here the Ohio Supreme Court Decreed in 1917 the city's lease to the Cincinnati Street Railway was illegal.

Starting point is 01:07:07 And it goes against Ohio law. Yeah. So now there's no one to lay the tracks and purchase the rolling stock, right? Oh, that, so that, those are important for a railway. Those are very important, yes. Without those you've just got a hole. Yeah, it's just a hole. And a Cincinnati street hole.

Starting point is 01:07:28 Yeah. Maybe it should be, that would be good. This was probably solvable. You know, it would just cause some confusion and delay while I work through the legal difficulties. It's not a fatal blow until America enters World War I. Oww. One of the things- Well it's good you did that, but-

Starting point is 01:07:47 Yeah. One of the first things they did was ban the sale of municipal bonds. Oh you dickheads. Yeah, because like, as we saw on that one L train earlier, you have to buy war bonds. You gotta buy the war bonds. So that was foreshadowing. Rod, you're getting very good at these. buy warbombs. ROD You gotta buy the warbombs instead, yeah. ALICE So that was foreshadowing. Rod's getting very good at these.

Starting point is 01:08:06 ALICE You gotta buy like ten million pairs of Pershing boots, you know? ROD Yes, exactly. ALICE Well, since Lassie has a really nice flag... Sorry, I have ADHD, possibly. ROD Possibly, huh? ROD Gotta do some vexology. ALICE I haven't been diagnosed, you know?

Starting point is 01:08:21 ROD I ain't me neither. We both have ADHD, that's fine. The six million dollars that was authorized by the public, that does not appear. Uh huh. Yeah, that's going to like, buy, uh, like... War bonds. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 01:08:41 One of those weird tanks. Like, gators, weird lemons, squeezer hats. Yeah. Yeah. One of those weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird,

Starting point is 01:08:50 weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird I know no one likes value engineering except the people who for some reason enjoy doing it and they're freaks.

Starting point is 01:09:08 Another project gets curb stomped by value engineering. So wait a minute. So let's just do a quick, I'm not going to derail the podcast, but I'm just going to say, so we have no trains, we have no tracks and now the money to build the infrastructure has also disappeared. Yes. Okay, noted. Right, cool. The money still exists, sort of, but it needs to be, you know, it can't be used until after the war, and also it's worth a lot less money now.

Starting point is 01:09:42 Yes. Yeah. So the engineers come back with something called Modification H. Oh boy. That's sinister. Basically the idea here is, okay, we're gonna get something built, right? Okay, that can be, that can sometimes be a good way to do things, build something. See, also HS2, we are building at least a bit of it that we will need later.

Starting point is 01:10:06 ALICE You kinda salt the thing a bit, you know? JUSTIN Yeah. So, they cut some tunnels north of downtown, they elevated some tracks, they put some tracks on the ground, they tried to use some existing right-of-ways near the Baltimore-Nahia Railroad, you know, overall they're just sort of, you know, they're cutting costs but they're still coming up with a functional product, right? Um, and this proved not to be enough with the inflation, right? So after Modification H, we had the most drastic cut, which was the entire eastern side of the loop was eliminated.

Starting point is 01:10:42 Oh. Oh. Yeah. Hey, but at least now it's not a loop, that. Oh. Oh. Yeah. Hey, but at least now it's not a loop, that's an efficiency gain. Dogleg. It also looks like the cheaper side, because it's mostly at or above ground level, so that kinda surprises me. There we go.

Starting point is 01:10:55 One big dogleg. It is all, like, pretty steep uphill though, I believe. Ah, okay. Okay. Ah, so lots of cut and fill. Okay, understood. Yeah, and then a big portion of this was eliminating the subway under Walnut Street down here. believe. Ah, okay. Okay. So lots of cut and fill. Okay, understood. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:11:06 And then a big portion of this was eliminating the subway under Walnut Street down here, because that would have been cut and cover under an existing active street instead of in a canal bed. Right? So that would be very expensive and disruptive. So they were, even though it's the most useful part, so they were like, all right, we're going to cut that for now and hopefully later we'll have the money to finish it, right? Carbrain, before Carbrain had ever arrived.

Starting point is 01:11:32 It interrupts all the people who like driving their horse. So the terminus of the system would be Race Street Station down here, which we'll talk a bit more about in a few slides because it's weird. But the main terminal at Fountain Street would have to wait for a while. So, they've eliminated a whole lot, but they're still going to build it. They start building in January 1920. Okay. All right. Oh, here we go. There's some copy of it. See here in this not very many pixel image

Starting point is 01:12:07 Constructing they're constructing the tubes in the open canal pit This is very very simple. It's cut and cover, but they don't have to do the cut part Everyone's real happy to get rid of this horrible smelly canal right apart from the workers I'm real happy to get rid of this horrible smelly canal, right? Apart from the workers. Yeah. This is just cast in place, reinforced concrete, nothing fancy here. There are different contractors working on different parts with slightly different materials. But overall the thing is pretty unified. There's rumors about low quality material and construction, but as we'll see that that's completely unfounded. I know they wound up like using a little bit lower quality

Starting point is 01:12:50 concrete than they expected but they sort of compromised with that for they just made the walls thicker it was fine. Yeah it's fine. I like this. This is this is nifty. It's quick, it's easy, I suppose that's why they built this bit. Oh yeah. The terminus of this line was a very strange station in Race Street. I'd actually, there's nowhere to find these images online, I had to take a picture from the book with my phone. Incredible.

Starting point is 01:13:16 Just fully lost media. Incredible. Exactly. So, a Race Street station was gonna be the centre centerpiece of, you know, Modification H. It's a four-track station with one convoluted island platform, right? Okay, bit of a weird design, I'm gonna be quite honest, but that's fine. The platform is H-shaped. Okay.

Starting point is 01:13:40 Well, uh-huh. And so you have one track up here, one track down here, and then two stub-ended tracks that terminate there. This is like something if you misclick in a game where you're building railways. It's a very strange design. But the idea here is these two stub-ended tracks are for inter-urban trains that are coming in and they're gonna stop and reverse, and then you'll have the outer tracks would be for the rapid transit trains that would presumably continue through once the subway

Starting point is 01:14:17 was completed down Walnut Street, down here at the end. It was also designed in such a way that it could be expanded with two extra platforms on each side, with this weird staircase that goes down and under the platforms, which pretty commonly shows up in images of this, that no one knows what it's for. Well, here's what it's for, folks. It's for extra tunnels to concourses underneath the central parkway. As well as extra platforms which were not built, but were anticipated to be needed at some point. ALICE Yeah, just like, getting this sort of masculine

Starting point is 01:14:57 urge to dig and letting it run riot- like, run riot municipally, being like, yeah, we- we're gonna need this for future trains, uh, nuclear war, a Morlock storage, child storage. We're not some kind of podunk town, this is Cincinnati, we're gonna need a four track subway at some point, come on guys. Yeah, based on current trends, Cincinnati will have eight trillion people by the year 2020. Exactly.

Starting point is 01:15:23 Um, there was also some amount of thought, since this is gonna be serving some interurbans that went quite a long distance, there will be room for baggage handling as well. Interesting. Unclear if this was actually followed through on. At each end of the station they built a Y, right, that's just a Y shaped piece of track that's for turning the interurbans around. Mason- So, right, I gotta interject again. I suppose that's what you do when you're a temporary host is, is it, sorry Roz, the problem

Starting point is 01:15:57 with them trying to do everything with this is that there is so much expensive extra stuff that they're putting in. The switchbacks are not necessary if they're running this as a pure metro system rather than with all the interurban interactions. ALICE It's trying to like, fuck with your flowchart a bit here and it's trying to be all things to all people. LIAM The other question, most interurbans are double ended, I don't know why they need the two Ys.

Starting point is 01:16:23 METEOR Because that's a lot of under the ground digging that they're having to do again. Like they don't need to do that. So they are adding like, this isn't value engineering so much as just doing sensible engineering. I would not, I would have been converting the interurbans or, or just managing that in such a way that you didn't have those switchbacks. Cause that's, that is a lot of extra cost. Also the track layout is so good. It's yeah. It's a bit bonkers.

Starting point is 01:16:49 Yeah, it's a bit bonkers. It's weird. Yeah. The why at the end here would eventually go down Walnut Street that would if they if they continued the tunnel to a actually more substantial, at Fountain Street. And this is the most commonly photographed space in the subway. You know, of what was eventually built. ALICE The creepiest looking one.

Starting point is 01:17:15 JUSTIN Yeah. Definitely creepy, because it's got the weird staircase to nowhere. ALICE Hell yeah. ALICE It's hauntology, but the better world envisioned as being able to go down a flight of stairs. Right. Now you can't do that. You can't go- it gets all flooded down there, yeah.

Starting point is 01:17:31 I guess you could if you wanted to die horribly, listen to the caves episode. Mm-mm. Oh, fuck with caves. Don't fuck with caves. So actually, they got a- Dad, are you listening? Stop fucking with caves. Mm. They got a substantial amount of this constructed, but they finished construction in 1926, the infrastructure's all there, but there's no tracks and there's no trains. About seven miles of right-of-way is finished.

Starting point is 01:17:58 I don't know, that sounds usable. Yeah, other than the lack of tracks, everything is there. But in the interim period- Just send the trains anyway, just like the sound of them. Just off-roading! Just dig your own rails, it's fine. In the interim period, while this was being constructed, a lot of people are buying cars. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:18:22 Those fuckin' pricks. Answer nothing when I record. And a lot of the inter-urban's that were designed to connect with the subway went out of business. Ah. This is, yeah. The new? Yeah. The new Central Parkway was still incomplete, that was facing a series of bond issue failures,

Starting point is 01:18:41 so there wasn't really a great way to get into downtown Cincinnati yet But you know the rapid transit line has been graded and constructed, but there's no tracks There's no trains and political issues start developing that makes sense as soon as it goes a political football pretty quickly Yeah, more so anyway, so Cincinnati of course is run by a Republican machine That was run by George Barnesdale Cox also known as Boss Cox. Boss Cox. Boss Cox.

Starting point is 01:19:12 Boss Cox. Boss Cox. And then later, uh, Rudolph Kelker Heinecker. All these fucking Germans. That guy, that guy, that guy mostly ran the political machine from Coney Island. Good for him. He didn't deign to go to Cincinnati, he just ran it. Absentee landlord.

Starting point is 01:19:33 Yes. They're doing all the normal stuff, you know, they're fixing elections, they're dispensing patronage jobs, they're giving out favors, redirecting city fees to private individuals, adjusting property tax assessments for supporters, you know, all the fun corruption stuff, right? The normal stuff, yeah. You know, and despite being initiated by a reformer, the rapid transit loop was of course a great source of patronage jobs, right? That makes sense.

Starting point is 01:20:01 But the machine is falling into crisis. Certain taxes- Oh no, now I'm a loyal machine. Stuck inside the belly of this machine. And this machine is not vibing. The machine stops, as it turns out. Oh no! My patronage jobs! Certain taxes were about to be made illegal by the state.

Starting point is 01:20:22 Income from liquor taxes had dried up because of prohibition, it was harder and harder to distribute patronage jobs when there's no money coming in, right? So this was a prime opportunity for a guy named Murray Seasongood to come in. With making up a fake name, like. Yeah. Yeah. And he is the leader of a movement called the Charterists. Not the Chartists.

Starting point is 01:20:49 Not the Lincoln Charterists. That's got no Charterists. Universal suffrage. Duh, these are the Charterists. Um, Seasongood wanted major reform, right, a complete rewrite of the city charter, he wanted to reduce the power of the mayor. He wanted the appointment of a professional city manager so there's the distance day-to-day operations from politics. Sounds like live shit to me.

Starting point is 01:21:11 Yeah, he wants to do all the normal good government stuff that all the progressives loved back then that just fucked everything up. And he got it. After campaigning against the Central Parkway bond issues which were separate from the rapid transit loop even though they were sort of the same Project he was elected mayor in 1925 and he goes in and he throws the bums out the entire City Council turned over Incredible was also reduced from I I believe, 32 members to nine. 32 people is too many people for a City Council. I can tell you that shit right now.

Starting point is 01:21:52 That's a sort of Venetian level of like... Yeah, exactly. Where's the Do Jet? Exactly. Yeah, and it was basically like, okay, who owns the tavern in this neighborhood? You're on City Council. Sure. And he sets his sight on this rapid transit loop, right? He commissions a new report called the Bieler Report on what to do with the incomplete subway. Bieler. Bieler. Bieler. Ross, have you ever even seen that movie? Yes, I have. That's another movie he's seen. Write it down. Write it down. Yeah. It's

Starting point is 01:22:22 a real short list. It genuinely is., the Bila report recommended finishing the tunnel under Walnut Street But also abandoning and demolishing several already built above-ground stations to save time compared to the surface street cars, right? What some of these some of these quite substantial? Above ground stations as you can see here The idea being that okay this this line is sort of it goes all the way around the hill And some of the streetcar lines have a more direct route so from certain stations. It would be Faster to take the streetcar than the new rapid transit now the thing is from other stations that would not be the case Yeah, and these stations that would not be the case. Yeah. What?

Starting point is 01:23:06 And these stations were already built. Just, they've built them. You don't have to stop the trains there, even that many times, but at least keep them there. Oh, I'm angry. Oh, I'm sad, no. And this sort of did not sit well with the public, you know, recommending demolishing these brand new stations. And so some nasty rumors start to circulate in the papers based on this report. You know, maybe the line was too circuitous. It was badly planned.

Starting point is 01:23:39 Maybe they made the curves in the city too tight for modern rapid transit, which they didn't do that. They were good for 45 miles an hour with a lot of superelevation and everything. There were rumors that, you know, streetcars weren't going to be able to use the tunnels, which they could theoretically. And then there was, you know, a pervasive rumor that the city was now too small for rapid transit at all, even though it had grown since the system was bland.

Starting point is 01:24:07 It's all HS2 arguments, they're all very familiar to anyone who- Do you think there was a kind of like, Cincinnati, like a German garroth back in the day? Like who was- There must have been, yeah. Just tearing his hair out. Yeah. Oh my god, I'm so angry about- Why has he tried to win? But my- Why, I'm so angry about

Starting point is 01:24:32 Spy oh The man is going on the list Season good was elected to a second term and abolished the old machine run rapid transit commission and put the project under full control of the city manager. They still didn't have the cash to complete the system, but a second report came out, also by Beeler, recommending full conversion to streetcar operation. M. That's also not a good idea. It's a The whole point of this is that it's hidden away segregated so you can get high capacity So you can run the long good trains with lots of people on them. Yeah, you for the system. Oh

Starting point is 01:25:16 I mean you already built it Already built. It's already there. You've built the fucking thing the thing It's already there. You've built the fucking thing. You've built the thing. You should use it. You've built the thing. You've built the thing. Ah. So this report actually had some legs, to the point where the Cincinnati Street Railway

Starting point is 01:25:32 actually purchased new trolley cars that could use the high platforms in the tunnel, and these things down here, called Red Devils, were purchased by the Cincinnati and Lake Erie interurban. Those were capable of 90 miles an hour. God damn. Geez. Ah. Fling that down the inside of a, like, former canal.

Starting point is 01:25:56 Well, the thing is, once they left the subway, this company was sort of a consolidation of a whole hell of a lot of interurbans in Ohio, so once they left the subway they then went 280 miles to Cleveland. In about 15 minutes, yeah. I'm thinking of the line from the take here, Pelham 123, what do they want, their lousy 50 and cents, to live forever? And that thing is the size and speed of a cannonball. It's quite something.

Starting point is 01:26:26 Yeah, so they are now, you know, it looks like, okay, maybe this is gonna go through. Some of the streetcar depots were actually, not depot, the car barns, were refitted with dual gauge track, with the anticipation that, okay, we're gonna get this thing up and running finally with something, right? And then, um, it's 1929 and the thing happens. ALICE & LIAM Oh boy. ALICE I hate when a thing happens. This time it's not cocaine, it's whatever the 1929 version of cocaine was. LIAM Also cocaine.

Starting point is 01:26:58 ALICE & LIAM Yeah, it's still guanum. ALICE Yeah. JUSTIN It's cocaine, but it's branded as a sort of tonic. Cocainium? War were declared, right, everyone was going out of windows and shit. October 29th, 1929, the Great Depression had started, the stock markets crashed, good luck funding that brand new never used subway. You know, you're not gonna get anyone to issue a municipal

Starting point is 01:27:26 bond right now. But on the other hand, they had managed to force through the parkway bond. Wow, look at that. Isn't that pretty? Oh my god. Central Parkway was completed and it was immediately a total failure because they built it on the canal which meant most of the buildings didn't face the parkway. ALICE Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, all the building's asses

Starting point is 01:27:51 were facing the road, yeah, that's it. NARES Exactly. This one segment here is an exception, but also this nice landscape median, guess what happened to that? ALICE Oh, more lanes. NARES Yeah, you need more lanes. Let's get real. ALICE Mmhm. Oh, more lanes. Yeah, you need more lanes. Let's get real. It's one more.

Starting point is 01:28:09 OK, so the subway is still there. People are going to try and revive this, right? One thing about the depression is we have this great guy named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He forced through this thing called the New Deal, and the New Deal funds a lot of infrastructure all across the country, right? Yeah, like this Sure. Yeah, this is presumably be one of those options. Yeah. Yeah The Works Progress Administration funded a new study for use of the subway in 1936 This recommended a total conversion to streetcar subway with replacing the high platforms with low platforms

Starting point is 01:28:46 Adding a bunch of new exits and entrances for various streetcars on you know local streets above Significant reconfigurations to the entire streetcar system You know and lots of weird stuff where the tunnels would tie themselves into knots in order to be able to use center platforms when the streetcars only had doors on one side And this is a very heavy lift that was very expensive and the city ultimately didn't go for it instead They asked the Work Progress Administration for parkways and slum clearance So there was still support for a streetcar subway, though, and the charterists had indeed turned the city's finances around.

Starting point is 01:29:29 Cincinnati could probably plausibly fund the thing by itself with a large municipal bond issue. You know, the economy is starting to improve. World War II hasn't quite happened yet. So the Ohio state legislator steps in and mandates a 65% supermajority for municipal bond issuances, and the idea was dead again. ALICE Of course. Fuck this idea specifically. ALICE Yeah. Yeah. It's not like they- they just seen- we'd just done big Keynesism, right?

Starting point is 01:30:00 So we'd just seen that investing infrastructure was good for economies, particularly urban economies Apparently no one had apparently no one realized this in Cincinnati or not in Ohio or in Ohio at the large. Yeah Fantastic. So we get through World War two And then some things happen that sort of change this the superity starts to be a big problem in the 1950s. No one in Ohio could, y'know, you couldn't finish the subway. You also couldn't build highways, you couldn't build airports, you couldn't build hospitals, infrastructure ground to a halt in the whole state. ALICE Just that thing where you accidentally, like,

Starting point is 01:30:39 abolish your own government for funsies. Yes. So in the meantime there's also a plan by the state to build a north-south highway, sort of roughly along the alignment of the old Miami and Erie Canal, right? That's now Interstate 75. Don't do it, don't do it, don't do do it That was originally supposed to connect up to the Parkway But the Parkway quickly became overwhelmed with traffic because you know traffic expands to fit the space allotted Mm-hmm So a new expressway to the north that paralleled the Mill Creek was necessary that passes through a narrow valley So of course space was limited, but some of that space was taken up by the grade for the rapid transit loop

Starting point is 01:31:29 That's up here ish, right? Yeah So of course through some creative financing and the state legislature Reducing the supermajority rule down to 55% in 1949 reducing the supermajority rule down to 55% in 1949, the city managed to alter the terms of the lease to the Cincinnati Southern Railroad, which until recently was the only interstate, municipally owned railroad in the United States. That went up for a vote that to for vote this year I think and the city finally sold it to Norfolk Southern You know now instead of it only being used to retire debt that money could fund any kind of transportation in the city

Starting point is 01:32:20 So now they were gonna use the revenue from the railroad to build a highway So now they were going to use the revenue from the railroad to build a highway All of these never used above-ground stations were demolished as was almost all the above-ground infrastructure You'd see one of the one of the stations had collapsed on its own by this point. I will say that Whoops God bless them saving everybody's time, I guess. Yeah, exactly. All that was left were a few short tunnels in the suburbs and the two mile tunnel under the parkway. This also thwarted a private plan to run freight trains in the tunnels.

Starting point is 01:32:57 Some people were still trying to do that. This is kind of like, freelancer. This is all prior to the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, right? That mandates a state and local and federal split for highway construction of five, five and 90 percent. You know, so if you wanted to build a transit project to get a dollar, you had to spend a dollar. But if you wanted to build a highway, you only five cents to get a dollar yeah I swear to fucking God I really want to

Starting point is 01:33:32 these people so the unbuilt eastern half of the rapid transit loop was then replaced with interstate 71 and the northern half, northern portion was replaced by State Route 562 up here. The whole rapid transit loop was now a highway. So I've got, yeah, I've got contemporary Google Maps up of Cincinnati. And one thing strikes me which is, holy shit, do highways obliterate the most theoretically good bits of the city. Like the waterfront, a park that has been obliterated, and oh my god, the lanes going everywhere, like it's proper body horror stuff. Oh yeah, the West End got particularly badly hit Because this is one of those neighborhoods that was like declared an overcrowded slum in like the 30s, right?

Starting point is 01:34:29 So the Works Progress Administration Paid to demolish this and replace it with public housing which was recently demolished and replaced by private housing You know, these are these are all like like you know good solid brownstones I mean they probably had sanitation issues at the time in the 30s But those are easy to correct with modern technology like plumbing But yeah, these were all knocked down for slum clearance and then knocked down for the Mill Creek Expressway and the approach to the Brent's best this Brent Spence bridge Right you can see up here Cincinnati Union Terminal Creek Expressway and the approach to the Brents Best- the Brents-Brents Bridge. Right, you can see up here Cincinnati Union Terminal.

Starting point is 01:35:09 That was very nearly demolished. Didn't quite happen. Even though it was quite new at the time. That was eventually saved by none other than Cincinnati Mayor Jerry Springer in the 80s. Future episode right there. Forgotting what podcast I'm on here. But essentially, yeah, a lot of the money that would have, the money and the planning that would have gone into the subway eventually went into, you know, destroying whole neighborhoods

Starting point is 01:35:40 and replacing them with highways. And here in the West End, these were mostly residential buildings. Today right up next to their huge train station, almost entirely one story light industrial buildings. Yeah. It's like the most stupid usage of zoning on a city skylines map I have ever seen. It is absolutely, it's wild. Also really upsetting on the other side of the city where you've got Mount Adams, which

Starting point is 01:36:08 is like a really, clearly like a bit of history, historic district, right? And it's just completely surrounded on three sides by highway. It's just, it's really up, it's like, it's pretty, it's like almost Detroit levels of destruction. It's quite spectacular, it's like, it's pretty hard. It's like almost Detroit levels of destruction. It's quite spectacular. What a mess. Yeah, Cincinnati got, got bad by the highways. That is ultimately, you know, it's, it's, it's amazing how far they went.

Starting point is 01:36:36 Yeah. Yeah. That's what happens when highway construction is basically free. Yeah. The good thing is, you can rip all of that up and replace it with, uh, ground level mass transit. Yes. That's what you need to do. Rip that shit up.

Starting point is 01:36:56 Theoretically. Theoretically. I mean, you know, the city ate itself alive as the new highway system allowed residents to live in distant suburbs, eventually they did access all that land to the north, and it was all built up as horrible single family homes. More sprawl. More McMansion bullshit.

Starting point is 01:37:13 They did it. Um, and so the tunnels just sat there until 1957, someone found something to do with them, which was to put a 52 inch water main in there. Oh boy. Just flood them, sweep out all the mollocks. One station was used over time as a fallout shelter, but it was kind of there to give the impression that there was a fallout shelter, rather than to actually be used as a fallout

Starting point is 01:37:41 shelter. Yeah, cause you had absolutely no- you have to have facilities for a fallout shelter, and I'm guessing they didn't put any of those in. Well, this is more like a room with water bottles in it. Yeah. Great, you can die of starvation after the thing. Yeah. The tunnels are all still there, they're inspected each month. They're still in good condition. Um,

Starting point is 01:38:05 there've been several proposals since then to try and reactivate the tunnels. Uh, a big one that looked likely to happen was back in the seventies when Lyndon Johnson finally came out and said, what if we gave money to a public transportation as well? Um, it looked like Cincinnati would be only a few, uh, positions in line past like Atlanta and San Francisco and where else got one? Baltimore in getting one of these modern great society style subways.

Starting point is 01:38:37 But the Urban Mass Transit Administration was pretty quickly, the conservatives put a stop to that nonsense. Oh, big heads. Brightened the pier. There was a plan to try and put light rail in the tunnels in the 1990s. That also failed. The big one most recently was the Metro moves project in 2002. The idea being they were going to put to voters a quarter cent sales tax increase, which would build one, two, three, four, five light rail lines and also build commuter rail out from, uh,

Starting point is 01:39:19 Cincinnati union terminal. Um, and this failed miserably at the ballot it was rejected two to one Kill all voters. I believe this is because quite recently before that there was another ballot measure that passed To raise the sales tax by a similar amount to build a stadium. Oh Okay, how's that going for you? They're always a bad idea. Oh, no, the Bengals are good Give Jamar chase the ball eventually rail transit Eventually rail transit does return to Cincinnati in the form of one of the Obama-era modern streetcars. Oh boy. Which could be a whole episode on their own at some point. This is now

Starting point is 01:40:12 called the Bell Connector. It is a streetcar in mixed traffic that runs in downtown Cincinnati and in over-the-rhyne. You know, it is, there's no dedicated lanes or anything like that. ALICE Oh my god. Ugh. Miserable. JUSTIN Again, these Obama era streetcars were deployed a lot of places, they were built very cheaply, and they're almost for increasing property values as much as they're for transportation.

Starting point is 01:40:38 A lot of them are slower than buses on the same route. ALICE Yeah, but they look futuristic, you know. JUSTIN They do look futuristic. This one does run on Walnut Street, where one of the tunnels was supposed to have eventually been. ALICE Hey, you can do an unironic... SEAN We're laughing at its corpse! ALICE An unironic, thanks Obama. Or I guess an ironic, unironic, thanks Obama. SEAN Yeah, thanks Obama. Yeah, this is no substitute for real rapid transit, which I think ultimately

Starting point is 01:41:06 that is what a city like Cincinnati needs. You know, I, everywhere these days people do light rail, especially in the United States where you probably want heavy rail actually. Mason- Yeah. Having worked on a few, I have to say strongly bizarre vibes off all the... I mean it's the same in the UK to be honest. Trams being proposed... trams are excellent, but they are to improve buses, they are not to replace metro systems and dedicated suburban rail. Cincinnati, enormous city, very sprawling city, needs the speed and the capacity that metros and suburban rail provide. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:41:50 Dig that highway up. The infrastructure's there, the tunnels are still there, they're good for modern subway cars. I mean, they're good for 45 miles an hour in there. I mean, you have the stuff, you may as well use it. Absolutely. But also dig up the highways. I would definitely dig up the highways. I mean you have the stuff you may as well use it Absolutely But also dig up the highways. I would definitely dig up the highways I mean there were some proposals when they were building them to have space for rapid transit and that just did not happen

Starting point is 01:42:15 Lol, no Yeah, of course not You know so all that's gonna be very expensive to implement these days You know it's it's it's it's amazing when you go back even to the Metro Moves plan in 2002, how much bang for the buck you got back then. Now everything's going to be very steep, very steep to do anything. Yeah, but we shouldn't, don't buy into the how much it costs. I know that some people on Twitter get very angry about how much everything costs it's like no shut the fuck up

Starting point is 01:42:48 build the thing it doesn't matter how much it costs just build it just build the damn thing. We had the federal government the money is actually fake yeah yeah yeah oh god I didn't think I'd get so upset on this one actually well I mean the one thing you can say is the tunnels are still there, they're still being maintained, they're still in good condition. Mm. Gonna figure out what to use them for sooner or later. Yeah, some people tried to start like a winery in there, that didn't work.

Starting point is 01:43:19 Every time someone proposes an alternate use for them, the insurance companies take them out. They'll do that. Yeah, the insurance companies take them out. They'll do that. It's kind of funny about that. I mean, yeah, ultimately they're only good for one thing and that's trains and apparently a water main. And some fiber optic cables I think are down there now too.

Starting point is 01:43:40 As long as they don't put HV cables down there, you're fine. Because as soon as HV cables go in there, you're screwed. They're too difficult to move. I think there's a redundant water main they built shortly afterwards, so if they have to remove that one, it'll be relatively easy. Ah, good. Good. Put trains in there.

Starting point is 01:43:58 Put trains in there, yeah. Well, what do we learn? Fucking nothing. Put trains in the thing. Put trains in the thing. Put trains in the thing. Put the trains in the thing, yeah. Rip up, rip up, rip up the tunnels. The Fed shouldn't be in charge of transport at all.

Starting point is 01:44:12 They can't be trusted. Like yes, the situation is still in... An intriguing corollary to abolish the Treasury, abolish the Department of Transportation. I mean, that's not the craziest idea I've heard. Yeah, it's amazing the outcomes you get when you make highway construction free. All of a sudden it's impossible to build anything other than highways. During the period when, you know, it would have been really relevant to get the subway done, you know, which is between like,

Starting point is 01:44:45 y'know, 1930 and like 1950. I believe there was only one rapid transit project underway anywhere in the United States, and that was building the State Street subway in Chicago. To be fair, we can't get on our high horse in the UK, because none, anywhere. No, don't you go asshole. Yep. No. We were building just a few extra tube lines, great for London, but nothing anywhere else.

Starting point is 01:45:16 Yep. How's the Glasgow subway looking, Nova? Ooh, I mean, there's new trains in it, which are worse in a lot of ways, and better in a couple, and then they're gonna make those sort of driverless soon, allegedly. NICHOLAS But you can't sit in the front and look out the window, can you? ALICE No, no you can't. They're still insanely loud and very rattly, and also the fact is, it's a loop, and if you build a loop,

Starting point is 01:45:45 like, you close yourself off into the fucking like, interstellar thing, or I guess the true detective thing, and if you go out west for instance, or further south or wherever, and you're like, man, I wish there was a subway here. Eh, get fucked. You know, cause you still have the loop that you had in like 1890 something, and changing it would be too difficult. So. Love Britain.

Starting point is 01:46:11 Love of the heart. Don't like it. The thing about Scotland as well is that you can't even do the like, don't like it, leave the United Kingdom. Because I tried, and that didn't work. So. Yeah thanks Alex Salmond for fucking that one up for us all. Rest in shit.

Starting point is 01:46:28 Uh. Well. We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. We've got a 50-50 chance. And she makes it. We take those. Alright. Hello Justin, Liam, November, Devin and Milkshake.

Starting point is 01:46:50 Today, I recount to you the majority circumstance that led to my untimely termination from an unnamed Canadian passenger railway. Well, that's one of like two, right? Yeah. And you have a picture. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At 19, I was fresh out of college with an associate's degree in railway operations and managed to join Canada's National Passenger Railway. Uh-huh. Okay, you're really narrowing it down. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:47:18 The main part of my job was quite simple, working as either a conductor or engineer to move equipment around our shop, in the yard, and at the adjoining passenger station. For the most part, that part of my job was great. Where the real difficulties lied were the myriad of other jobs myself and the rest of my crew could be put on when not switching. Such jobs included but were not limited to... Cleaning locomotive engine rooms and cabs.

Starting point is 01:47:48 Dumping locomotive toilets. General shop cleanup. Cleaning up the managers and administrative offices. Running errands, like picking up parts and materials, and most significant to our story today, locomotive exterior washing. So you had to be like a fucking, oh God, what's the word for the like, a domestique? You had to be a domestique like on a fucking Tour de France team. I was bouncing back and forth between domestique and stagia, which is funny given that I don't remember how to, I don't know how to ride a bike, but like-

Starting point is 01:48:23 The phrase I was thinking of was Charlie work. A dog's body? Yeah, it's funny given that I don't remember how to- I don't know how to ride a bike, but like- The phrase I was thinking of was Charlie work. Uh, dog's body? Yeah, it's Charlie work, yeah. So, a locomotive's exterior could be washed in a myriad of ways. One was our very entertaining, yet largely ineffective train wash system that would reliably leave the sides of the train wet and occasionally cleaner. See, figure one.

Starting point is 01:48:46 The train wetter. Yeah. Another method was at what we called the wash pit, a section of track just outside the shop which suspended the rails on I-beams above an access pit and had two levels of scaffolding above to access either side of the body and the roof of the locomotives. Using the wash pit, industrial pressure washers, and lots of chemicals deemed to cause cancer in the state of California, we could meticulously restore even the nastiest shit-cake locomotives to a rather impressive level of cleanliness, albeit rather slowly." ALICE First of all, um, Powerwash simulated DLC when. Second of all, um, I know I've mentioned this before previously, but like, it is genuinely impressive to me, and I think generally unknown by a lot of people how nasty everything around

Starting point is 01:49:38 a working railway gets. Everything is covered in, like, just like, the nastiest mixture of, like, just like grit and dirt and mud and shit and like, every possible toxic chemical. Which is cool. You ever ride an M-Trac long distance train? Take a look at the locomotive at the end of the trip. It's up there with, like, ocean-going ships, where you're like, this just gets nasty over time and there's not much you can do to prevent that, you know?

Starting point is 01:50:10 METE You can happily go to any terminal, almost every terminal station in Britain will still, will just have like, they won't have done much to the tracks of the terminal tracks, cause you can't, there's no point, and they will be coated in all of what Nova just described. And let me tell you, as someone who spent, and will probably continue to spend quite a bit of time out on track, yes. RILEY Yeah. I mean, you know, sometimes the locomotive comes in and it has a deer impaled on the knuckle. ALICE Uh huh. Do you remember when they did that study a few years ago that tried to work out the average color of the universe, right, which is this kind of mocha brown?

Starting point is 01:50:47 The average color of the railway is, like, just kind of shit brown. As you can tell, because everything averages out to it. ROCKET Brown. Mhmm. What can brown do for you? Yes. Give you some intriguing diseases. What can brown do for you? Yes Intriguing diseases You know ups brown is a candidate for what the original Pullman green was I kind of like the ups brown

Starting point is 01:51:13 I think a nice dark brown is kind of cool But this is not I'm not talking about a nice dark brown took about a really dull Then there was the third option unbeknownst to, until the day I was told to do it. There was a third option at the east end of track two. This was a location so far away from the shop, no pressure washer or garden hose could feasibly reach it. On that hot July day, myself and my coworker were told by a manager to go wash a customer's locomotive on track 2. In an effort to make extra dough, our maintenance center had contracts with some of the other railways to maintain and store their equipment. After much back and forth regarding the feasibility of the task and countless offerings to move the locomotive to a more appropriate location,

Starting point is 01:52:03 we were handed two telescopic scrub brushes, a bucket of water, and a pump action spray bottle of corrosive alkaline degreaser. Oh Jesus. Much to our dismay and with a fear that refusal may result in a write up for insubordination, we proceeded. With one person acting as a runner and the other one taking turns throwing water as high as they could, then chasing the splash with the degreaser and vigorously scrubbing, we somehow managed to wash the entire locomotive.

Starting point is 01:52:37 Then came the rinse. Oh. Oh boy. The locomotive in question was an MP36PH, shown here. More commonly referred to as a dildo liner. Named for the town in Newfoundland, I assume. Oh, you know what you should go to. Yeah, it's a very nice town.

Starting point is 01:52:59 Dependent on the whims of, like, immigration Canada. Coming in at an overall length of 70 feet and just under 16 feet tall, this made bucket-aided of, like, immigration Canada. of our request. We did our best, each taking turns chucking buckets of water onto the locomotives phallic cowl until it was time to pack up and call it a day. The next day was a departure day, followed by the weekend, followed by an arrival day and another departure. It was five days later we could truly witness the fruits of our labor or rather hear about it. Fifteen minutes into my shift, an audibly frantic voice erupted from my radio, beckoning me over to the wash pit. Oh boy.

Starting point is 01:53:52 It was there I found my manager frantically rubbing the locomotive windows, as where there once stood rinse water, there were now half-millimeter deep cavities in the protective coating on each of the locomotive's windshield panels. Oh, any time you get to, like, specialized applications of glass, I'm like, that's so much money! There's like one factory that makes these! And it's out of business. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:54:25 Needless to say, this was a suboptimal windshield condition that only worked to further enrage the hot-headed manager that originally put me to the task. To quickly sum it up, she had a long history of unprovoked negative interactions directed at myself and her other subordinates. So regardless of fault, this would still be a burden I'd have to bear. This incident, despite not being formally investigated by management, would soon later be cited in my dismissal, following me bottoming out a poorly maintained forklift that myself and others had continuously reported to management for having amongst other things bald tires no coolant a broken coolant reservoir and most concerning a

Starting point is 01:55:10 non-functioning parking brake oh Incredible Johnny Union in the two weeks leading up to my dismissal I consulted my agreements union rep for what to do when likely facing termination, okay? Instead of preparing a logical counterargument and other evidence to support my innocence, he advised me to injure myself on the job to claim I was wrongfully terminated." Oh, fuck it! Union strong, baby. I- mm, okay. Not all unions create an equal. Mm, okay. Not all unions create equal

Starting point is 01:55:51 Incredible how do I get out of the fucking Pacific theater of operations shit? Wow wrap it up trust your gut if you ever find yourself in a situation where your decision will either result in thousands of dollars In damage or an ins insubordination write up, it's probably best to step back and ponder updating your resume. And for the love of God, don't let your union rep be elected purely by no contest. Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, get involved. An act of pure masochism, I've since hired onto another railway with its own host of problems, so I'm sure I'll have more stories to share.

Starting point is 01:56:25 ALICE The other Canadian Railroad. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for letting me ramble and keeping me company on long drives to and from the rail yards. From Anonymous. ALICE Fuck. Yeah, speaking of that, I saw a TikTok of a guy who was listening to us when his dashcam caught him getting in a car accident.

Starting point is 01:56:47 ALICE There have been several of those. SEAN Yeah, there's been a few of those, yeah. ALICE Yeah, I feel like if you crash your car while listening to us and it's not your fault we should be able to issue you a shirt or something. SEAN Yeah. I just wanna say there does seem to be a pattern in the railroad of people pointing out problems and then getting fired for doing so. Mm, curious.

Starting point is 01:57:13 Somehow safety averse culture. It keeps happening. The trouble is, yeah, we need to, we have to rise up and kick the suits out and then run the railroad proper. Yes. Last time that opinion was mooted was like 1917 in Russia, and you know what, they were right to do it then too. It worked.

Starting point is 01:57:38 This is the type of shit that leads railroad employees to start forming like infantry battalions. Yeah, cause then you get to round up a load of people and then you can send them off in front of their... Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the only thing that remained functioning was the public transit and the railways. Oh, I mentioned that in the book. Buy the book.

Starting point is 01:58:04 Buy the book. Buy the book. Buy the book. But more importantly buy tour tickets. Yeah. There are a lot of seats to fill up. Hold on, I'm supposed to go on the next slide. That was Safety 3rd. 50-50 chance. It's a real memory test there. Our next episode will be on Chernobyl, does anyone have any commercials before we go? Yeah, buy some tickets to the fucking tour if you sort of like, forgot to do that already. Buy multiple tickets, buy them for your friends, your family, your significant other. Do like, machine politics shit, like, buy tickets for some guy, like shave them and bring them around again, buy some more

Starting point is 01:58:46 tickets, like... Buy a ticket for your dog. Buy a ticket for your cat, we'd love to meet your cat. We would. Buy a ticket for... Just whoever you think you can get to the venue, you know, bring the whole polycule. Hand them out on the street. Yeah, exactly, bring the polycule, bring the uh, what other kinds of ethical non-monogamy are there?

Starting point is 01:59:11 Just imagining Times Square, but it's like that scene at the start of Death of Stalin. Yes, yes, yes. Which is just on people case. Come and see a podcast live show. Yeah, exactly. Bring, bring, bring, bring your wives, bring your concubines. Anybody, we'll take anybody. Bring your wives, bring your wives boyfriends, like, anybody you can get, like...

Starting point is 01:59:35 We'll have one section of chairs at the venue slightly separate for cucks. Aww. Bring, bring, give, give, give a ticket to your boss. Um. Yeah. And then we will- Bring your entire, like, office. Do like a works outing to see us.

Starting point is 01:59:54 Yeah. I would actually love that. I think that would be sick. Yeah, bring, uh, if you're in the military, bring your whole platoon. Uh huh. Yeah, absolutely. Do like a divisional level kind of like training outing to come and see us.

Starting point is 02:00:07 Show up in uniform to freak us out, it'll be funny. Yeah, buy a ticket. I'm not gonna freak out, I'll salute you and thank you for your service in a dubiously ironic way. Yes, if you're in the FBI or a member of our law enforcement community. I genuinely, it will be an honor to meet some of my surveillance officers for the first time. That'd be fun. Something I've established before, I will sign anything you put in front of me. If you're a firefighter you could show up with the Dalmatian,

Starting point is 02:00:39 that'd be cool. True, true. Yeah. Buy a ticket, give it to the Prime Minister of the UK, he is easy to buy. If you work for the postal service, like, uh... If you're a garbage man, bring the truck. Uh huh. Just, come prepared to do like, show and tell for like, whatever your job is, you know? Yes, exactly. You could show up in a subway car, all the venues are transit accessible, we made sure of that.

Starting point is 02:01:14 Hell yeah. No one's getting stranded in the middle of nowhere, hopefully. Nice. Unless they sell the railroad halfway, like in midday. Yeah. In which case we just lead you on foot to the nearest, like, sort of like, transit link. You have to go on an expedition. Like the Dodgers want you to do from... That's exactly what I'm thinking of the Dodgers. A 25 minute walk.

Starting point is 02:01:40 Walk from Chinatown to Dodger Stadium, yeah. So yeah, buy tickets to that, come to the library to talk, buy Gareth's book. Yes, yes please do. I've sold 600 of them so far, which is apparently extremely good for a indie publisher. First time book, so yeah. The book is called How the Railways Will Fix the Future? Oh yeah, I keep forgetting to tell people what it is, I just say yeah the book is called how the railways will fix the future oh yeah I keep forgetting to tell people what it is I just say buy the book and then tell people

Starting point is 02:02:08 to Google the book and see what happens how the rails will fix the future yeah um listen to no gods no mirrors it's new it's very very funny it's extremely funny in fact highly recommend it thank you very much and and I'm also getting very very excited for robbery season on kill James Bond. That I'm extremely excited about. It's very soon, it's very soon, it's a matter of weeks away. I'm excited. And, uh, and listen to Ten Thousand Losses as well.

Starting point is 02:02:33 Yeah, thank you. It's fun to drop in and, and, uh, I know nothing about sports, but I was a guest on there, and it's good fun just listening listed in and Heard about the sports sometimes you talk about refrigerators being airdropped by massage Let's wrap up all right that was the podcast good night everyone. All right good night. Good night

Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 168: Cincinnati's Ghost Subway

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