Speaker 1: Imagine the place where you can escape for a day,
Speaker 1: get immerged in a world of rooms, inspiration and expertise,
Speaker 1: where you can lay in luxury, accommodation and kids cam
Speaker 1: fees from ninety five sets. Tickets are free to everyone
Speaker 1: and include all the attractions you've just imagined a day
Speaker 1: out at ikia Ikia the Wonderful.
Speaker 2: Every day, your flat out and your to do list
Speaker 2: is grown by the minute, but unfortunately, so is your headache,
Speaker 2: and now you've gone from flat out to flattened. Luckily,
Speaker 2: Panodal extra film coated tablets are boosted by caffeine and
Speaker 2: they get to work in as little as ten minutes
Speaker 2: for powerful relief. That's more than just paracetamol. That's one
Speaker 2: for panadal speed based on absorption data contains paracetamol. Always
Speaker 2: read the label or leaflet.
Speaker 3: Oh hey, it's your great grandpa's granddaughter who's also your wife,
Speaker 3: but whatever, because it's the seventeen hundred's Alie Ward and
Speaker 3: that'll make sense later. Back with another episode of Ologies.
Speaker 3: So this time we are off the rails with a
Speaker 3: real first class episode about train stuff, all kinds of
Speaker 3: train stuff. Who But before we get to this interview,
Speaker 3: some quick business. So thank you to patrons. I see you,
Speaker 3: I appreciate you. You make this podcast happen every week.
Speaker 3: I would not be able to pay an editor. Hi, Stephen,
Speaker 3: what's up to make the show without you? Guys? So
Speaker 3: patrons get extra content, They get to submit their questions
Speaker 3: to ologists ahead of time. They get some AMA videos
Speaker 3: once a month, in which I'm usually disheveled, and maybe
Speaker 3: two candid But that's part of what you get. If
Speaker 3: you ever want to spot other oligites in the wild.
Speaker 3: There are t shirts and hats and bathing suits, etc.
Speaker 3: Pins at ologiesmerch dot com and on Mondays. I post
Speaker 3: your photos on the ologies Instagram in the things, So
Speaker 3: if you wear ologies merch around, just let me see it.
Speaker 3: Let me see it, kiddos, let me look at it. Also,
Speaker 3: I'll be in Portland on September fifteenth for an event
Speaker 3: called camp Ologies. It's a one day thing with some
Speaker 3: ologists who will be there. There's gonna be some weird crafting,
Speaker 3: a lot of science gabbing, some games, generally just an
Speaker 3: excuse to make new friends in the woods. And tickets
Speaker 3: are forty bucks. I'm excited to see some of you there. Also,
Speaker 3: thank you for rating and reviewing and subscribing and keeping
Speaker 3: ologies in like the top twenty or so science podcast
Speaker 3: on iTunes with all the big shows that have like
Speaker 3: staffs and record in not closets. I'm somewhat, I would say,
Speaker 3: I'm I'm in the orange area on a scale of creepiness,
Speaker 3: not quite red, but I'm an orange. And I read
Speaker 3: all of your reviews because it's just so nice that
Speaker 3: you leave them, and so to prove it, I read
Speaker 3: a fresh one each week. This one is from m
Speaker 3: Soldier sixteen. They say this podcast is such an easy listen.
Speaker 3: It makes the most ordinary and seemingly uninteresting topics seem
Speaker 3: like that little thing you've been missing your life. Would
Speaker 3: rate six stars if possible. Thank you. I'm Soldier sixteen.
Speaker 3: If you're like I don't think i'd be into this topic,
Speaker 3: go back and listen to it. I hide some weird
Speaker 3: stuff in there for everyone. Okay, Pharaoh equnology, y'all, this
Speaker 3: is the best etymology you will ever hear. It doesn't
Speaker 3: get better. This is gonna be the best one. So
Speaker 3: let's do a drum roll before I break it down.
Speaker 3: It means iron horse, Pharaoh equin iron horse and it's
Speaker 3: the study of trains. Hulking, puffing, crushing, tireless, history, altering trains. Okay,
Speaker 3: So Wendy at the Henry Ford Museum sets me up
Speaker 3: with a Pharaoh equinologist, and this dude is responsible for
Speaker 3: the care of a priceless collection of historical cars and planes,
Speaker 3: several locomotives, and an operational steam train. More on why
Speaker 3: that's like a huge deal later. And the last time
Speaker 3: I went to the Ford, I stood staring up at
Speaker 3: this massive coal powered steam locomotive, the Alleghany, which is
Speaker 3: two stories tall. It's as long as a twelve story building,
Speaker 3: and it could pull one hundred and sixty cars full
Speaker 3: of coal up the Appalachian Mountains. Train nerds, it's a
Speaker 3: two sixty six with a power output of seventy five
Speaker 3: hundred horsepower. Non train nerds, that's as technical as this
Speaker 3: episode really gets. I'll be honest with you. I just
Speaker 3: wanted to make everyone happy, Okay. Anyway, I was like,
Speaker 3: who trains what? So we met up in this little
Speaker 3: classroom off the main museum entrance, and this guy has
Speaker 3: been on TV so much talking about transportation history that
Speaker 3: he is able to produce concise factually accurate soundbites with
Speaker 3: correct dates. She's like a tennis ball machine. He's amazing.
Speaker 3: He's an absolutely inexhaustible treasure trove of train facts. So
Speaker 3: let's not miss this old bored for pharaoh equinologist Matt Anderson,
Speaker 3: how do you feel about the term pharaoh equinologist? Do
Speaker 3: you love it as much as I do?
Speaker 4: I love it. It's a lot of fun to say,
Speaker 4: and it's one of those terms that you know, when
Speaker 4: people first hear it, they're absolutely confused by it, but
Speaker 4: then when you break it down, makes perfect sense.
Speaker 3: Right what iron horse? Is that what they were called initially?
Speaker 4: Yes? Yeah, they were referred to as iron horses, and
Speaker 4: any Western movie that you watch, you know, they talk
Speaker 4: about the iron horse and so forth. But it's a logical,
Speaker 4: I think, description of a locomotive.
Speaker 3: Oh one hundred percent. When I found out that a
Speaker 3: pharaoheconologist was a word, I lost my marbles. I was like,
Speaker 3: you're kidding me, that's amazing. We never thought of That's
Speaker 3: a genius. Okay. So once you have secured the most
Speaker 3: eneviable business card, what kinds of jobs can you do
Speaker 3: as a pharaoh equinologist and what's your title here.
Speaker 4: I'm Curator of Transportation here at the Henry Ford.
Speaker 3: How long have you had this job.
Speaker 4: I've had this job now for about six and a
Speaker 4: half years.
Speaker 3: Really, yeah, was it your dream?
Speaker 4: It was. I grew up in Michigan, not not in Detroit,
Speaker 4: but we used to drive down here every summer to
Speaker 4: visit the museum in the village, So a chance to
Speaker 4: come work here was a dream come true.
Speaker 3: So did you see some of these trains when you
Speaker 3: were growing up, the same ones that you are in
Speaker 3: charge of?
Speaker 4: I did. I have a picture of my office of
Speaker 4: me as a six year old boy standing on the
Speaker 4: pilot of the Alleghany. So it's nice. It's very cool
Speaker 4: to come back here and now get to work with
Speaker 4: it every day.
Speaker 3: So did you do you realize when you were growing
Speaker 3: up that that was making that much of an imprint
Speaker 3: or how do you become an transportation enthusiast who turns
Speaker 3: into a job.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the enthusiast part's easy, right. So I've been into
Speaker 4: trains and cars really since since Boywood. But you know,
Speaker 4: I never really considered that people actually made a living
Speaker 4: at museums, So it never occurred to me until I
Speaker 4: actually went to college. I initially was going to be
Speaker 4: a high school history teacher and then took a class
Speaker 4: called Intro to Public History and learned about this idea
Speaker 4: of working in museums, archives, libraries and thought, you know,
Speaker 4: that might be kind of fun, and so far it
Speaker 4: has been so quick.
Speaker 3: Shout out to the Museology episode with Ronnie Klein, who
Speaker 3: breaks down what it's like to work behind the scenes
Speaker 3: of all the exhibits that the rest of us aren't
Speaker 3: allowed to touch but really want to like so bad. Okay, Matt, Now,
Speaker 3: when you were growing up, were you into trains?
Speaker 4: I was, Yes, took my first train ride at two
Speaker 4: years old and absolutely loved watching them go by, riding them,
Speaker 4: anything they had to do with them, playing them certainly.
Speaker 4: So definitely.
Speaker 3: Why do you think people like trains so much? Because
Speaker 3: I feel like there's two kinds of people. There are
Speaker 3: people who are into trains, and then there are people
Speaker 3: who are like, what, Yeah, trains are cool, like train
Speaker 3: enthusias are into it. Like what happens to get people
Speaker 3: so into trains?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Well I've got sort of my enlightened intelligent answer,
Speaker 4: and then I've got my gut answer. I think the
Speaker 4: enlightened answer would be the trains are really unique in
Speaker 4: American history, and that they're so closely tied with the
Speaker 4: history of this country. I mean, we've had railroads for
Speaker 4: all but fifty years that we've had a nation, and
Speaker 4: you think about the role they played in the Civil War,
Speaker 4: you think about the trans Continental Railroad. The effects they
Speaker 4: had really even into the early twentieth century is really
Speaker 4: really fascinating study. But I think the simple answers. You know,
Speaker 4: we're just fascinated by big things, and on land you
Speaker 4: can't find anything much bigger than a train. It's just
Speaker 4: incredibly impressive. It's kind of awesome to see one, to
Speaker 4: feel one. You know, you feel trucks and cars, but
Speaker 4: not the way you feel a train, which kind of
Speaker 4: rumbles in your chest even before you see it. So
Speaker 4: that's that's an amazing thing.
Speaker 3: I never thought about that, about the really visceral experience
Speaker 3: of having a train go by.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's really you know, and you go to a
Speaker 4: roilroad crossing and there's almost this builds in climax. You know,
Speaker 4: you hear the bells and the lights starving kind of
Speaker 4: builds up the anticipation. Then you hear the whistle in
Speaker 4: the distance or the horn, and then yeah, the ground
Speaker 4: shakes underneath you as this thing goes by, and you
Speaker 4: just hear the rumble of that diesel motor. It's a
Speaker 4: lot of fun.
Speaker 3: So side note, at least one person has been identified
Speaker 3: as being in a monogamous relationship with a steamy locomotive.
Speaker 3: So this German Man nam Joaquin does admit though, that
Speaker 3: he has this affinity for fixing things and that can
Speaker 3: lead to emotional infidelity with other objects. And a California
Speaker 3: woman named Carol is married to a train station in
Speaker 3: San Diego. She rides a bus forty five minutes a
Speaker 3: day just to hang out in the station and touch
Speaker 3: the walls and talk about our day, which honestly sounds
Speaker 3: like a healthier relationship than a lot of people have.
Speaker 3: I have never dated anyone who would ride the bus
Speaker 3: that long to kick it with me, especially while I
Speaker 3: was at work multitasking. Did you grow up with train
Speaker 3: tracks near you? Did you hear them or see them
Speaker 3: growing up?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 4: Yeah, we had train tracks not too far from where
Speaker 4: I was, And I grew up in a town that
Speaker 4: had two railroads and kind of typical of American cities,
Speaker 4: and we lost one of our railroads in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 4: A lot of lines have now been abandoned as the
Speaker 4: railroads have kind of consolidated their operations. But now I
Speaker 4: would run out and watch watch trains on both of them,
Speaker 4: a lot of fun.
Speaker 3: What was the dumbest thing you ever put on a track?
Speaker 4: To be honest, like like everyone, of course, I put
Speaker 4: my share of coins on a railroad track, you know,
Speaker 4: to watch the pennies and the nickels get flattened. And
Speaker 4: you know, I probably shouldn't say this for publication, but
Speaker 4: at one point a group of friends of mine actually
Speaker 4: put jumper cables on a railroad track near a railroad
Speaker 4: crossing to activate the crossing. Is you know, fun to
Speaker 4: experiment how do those things work? And that did it,
Speaker 4: so you know, it was a lightly used line. We
Speaker 4: didn't it was in the middle of the night. We
Speaker 4: didn't put anyone in danger, but it was it was
Speaker 4: kind of fun to do.
Speaker 3: Do I need to tell you not to do this,
Speaker 3: because don't do this. Don't do this. Also, with the
Speaker 3: distraction of the Internet, now kids would probably be like, uugh,
Speaker 3: that pray is way too much work. It's too much
Speaker 3: laborious mischief. They run on electricity.
Speaker 4: The Yeah, the crossing signals are actually completed by what
Speaker 4: an effect is a short circuit caused by the metal
Speaker 4: train axle in the wheels passing over the track. So
Speaker 4: you jumper cable can create that same effect.
Speaker 3: I had no idea.
Speaker 4: Yeah, don't try this at home.
Speaker 3: But yeah, did you go and find the coins after
Speaker 3: you flatten them?
Speaker 4: Of course? Yeah? Yeah, and they fell off the tracks.
Speaker 4: You had to dig through the ballast and the stones,
Speaker 4: but I pulled them out. You know, it's amazing. There
Speaker 4: was really nothing recognizable of those coins after the train
Speaker 4: went over them.
Speaker 3: Oh man, quick aside for real, though, playing on train
Speaker 3: tracks super dangerous. People have suffered fatal consequences by putting
Speaker 3: even a penny on the track and then standing on
Speaker 3: another track not knowing which track the train was barreling down.
Speaker 3: So maybe outsource the work man. Pinterest led me to
Speaker 3: a designer in the tumbleweed strewn wilds of West Texas
Speaker 3: who sells necklaces hand fashioned from low sourced quote train
Speaker 3: squashed pennies off the railroad tracks in Marfa sixty bucks.
Speaker 3: Pretty cute. Speaking of dusty vistas and westward expansion, I
Speaker 3: asked Matt for a quick history lesson, and he delivered. Now,
Speaker 3: can you give me a little bit? I know this
Speaker 3: is like a huge question. I get this is a
Speaker 3: huge question. Can you give me your cocktail party history
Speaker 3: of trains in America?
Speaker 4: I could?
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: I think the railroad as a concept as we understand
Speaker 4: it today really starts in eighteen twenty eight with the Baltimore,
Speaker 4: Ohio Railroad, which was the first common carrier railroad in
Speaker 4: the US, which means it wasn't just hauling stones from
Speaker 4: a quarry or a coal from a mine, but it
Speaker 4: was carrying all kinds of freight. And it fascinates me
Speaker 4: that the first stone, the ceremonial cornerstone for that railroad,
Speaker 4: was laid by a man named Charles Carroll of Carrollton,
Speaker 4: who at that time was the last living signer of
Speaker 4: the Declaration of Independence.
Speaker 3: So I was like, ooh, maybe I'll find out like
Speaker 3: a fun fact about this Charles Carroll of Carrollton, and
Speaker 3: puh boy, howdy kiddos did I Okay, I'm gonna be quick.
Speaker 3: First off, he was the wealthiest of all the founding fathers,
Speaker 3: with a fortune equivalent now to about half a billion dollars.
Speaker 3: He was from Maryland. He thought slaves should be freed,
Speaker 3: but not his what. He also married his friend and
Speaker 3: the mary married cousins had seven kids, most of which
Speaker 3: didn't make it, but one son was kind of like
Speaker 3: a rich n'er Dowell like you would expect to see
Speaker 3: in like an eighties movie about a frustrated rich father
Speaker 3: with like a deadbeat kid, or like now in like
Speaker 3: high political office. Anyway, Chucky c had a remarkable shelf
Speaker 3: life and lived pretty much for an eternity, like this
Speaker 3: guy was like in a live mummy. And so when
Speaker 3: it was time to lay the first railroad brick, they
Speaker 3: were like haul out Charles Carroll of Carrolton, that was
Speaker 3: his official name. Let's get him up here. He's ninety
Speaker 3: one years young. Let's see him. He lived to ninety
Speaker 3: five until he didn't, and then there was a national
Speaker 3: day of mourning. Okay, that was a lot of information.
Speaker 3: But let's hop the bullet train to Inpoville. Because Matt
Speaker 3: is a walking encyclopedia. He's about to give us the
Speaker 3: most succinct railroad history lesson maybe ever, you've.
Speaker 4: Got this direct link to fourth of July seventeen seventy
Speaker 4: six here at the start of the railroads. It's a
Speaker 4: great way I think of kind of passing the torch
Speaker 4: to the next generation in American history. And then, yeah,
Speaker 4: from their lines kind of built up around the United States.
Speaker 4: They started as regional affairs, like that that B and
Speaker 4: O was supposed to connect Baltimore with the Ohio River.
Speaker 4: Other small states and communities built their railroads. In Michigan,
Speaker 4: we had fairly early railroads. Our first line was built
Speaker 4: in eighteen thirty seven and we had only been a
Speaker 4: state for a year at that point, basically. And then
Speaker 4: those smaller lines start to grow into each other and consolidate.
Speaker 4: The Civil War, I think is a big turning point too,
Speaker 4: and then after that you've got things like and here
Speaker 4: gauge now where railroads aren't aren't some of the more
Speaker 4: six feet before, some of them four feet eight and
Speaker 4: a half inches. They all became the same gauge, so
Speaker 4: we have a real interchangeable network. And then they peak
Speaker 4: right about nineteen fifteen, nineteen sixteen with the maximum mileage
Speaker 4: in the US. And then from that point it's been
Speaker 4: a slow story of kind of abandonment of lines or backtracking.
Speaker 4: If you're pardon the expression. And of course a lot
Speaker 4: of that is because of the automobile and then later
Speaker 4: airplanes as well, But railroads are still a vital part
Speaker 4: of American life today. We just don't think of them.
Speaker 4: They're They're like the plumbing in our house, you know,
Speaker 4: you just you take it for granted until something goes wrong.
Speaker 3: Oh god, that's true. Now is it hard for you
Speaker 3: because you also curate automobiles here? Do you have something
Speaker 3: in your head that's like a little trains versus cars? Like,
Speaker 3: are you ever are you ever like a little pod
Speaker 3: at cars? Because of how they took over for trades.
Speaker 4: You know, I do wish that we had the robust
Speaker 4: passenger network that we had, you know, even just fifty
Speaker 4: sixty years ago, that we just don't have today. I Mean,
Speaker 4: amtrack is out there, but it's really a skeleton of
Speaker 4: what we once had to It would be nice to
Speaker 4: hop into a train sometimes and take a trip, you know,
Speaker 4: some distance, rather than having to drive there. So yeah,
Speaker 4: there's a little bit of meus like that. But you know,
Speaker 4: I also realized that railroads had a part in popularizing
Speaker 4: the automobile. You know, they saw the car not as
Speaker 4: an enemy when it first appeared, but they saw it
Speaker 4: as a possible ally, you know, farmers can bring goods
Speaker 4: from their farm to our depot rather than us having
Speaker 4: to build all these little branch lines that don't make
Speaker 4: enough money for us. But obviously cars grew a little
Speaker 4: farther beyond what road then is paid.
Speaker 3: And now what happens to abandon railroad lines? Like are
Speaker 3: they paved over? Are they just kind of sitting there?
Speaker 3: And like maybe we'll use them later with different types
Speaker 3: of locomotives.
Speaker 4: Yeah, We've got a great program in this country called
Speaker 4: Rails Trails, the Rails to Trails Contrivancy, which has argued
Speaker 4: for the preservation of these corridors and a lot of them,
Speaker 4: particularly here in Michigan, where we've had a lot of
Speaker 4: lines abandoned, get paved over and turned into all purpose
Speaker 4: recreational trails, so for biking, jogging, hiking, you name it.
Speaker 4: So it's a great use.
Speaker 3: Side note, I had to see what they look like,
Speaker 3: so I checked the Instagram hashtagacy if anyone else had
Speaker 3: even heard of this, and hi, hello, there were like
Speaker 3: thirty four thousand photos tagged rails to trails. Good God,
Speaker 3: the Majesty. There's like tunnels and lush greenery and biking
Speaker 3: and trestles you can walk over. And so I went
Speaker 3: to railstotrails dot org and they have this interactive map.
Speaker 3: You can click your state, you can find all the
Speaker 3: abandoned railway lines you can hike on. And I started
Speaker 3: getting I'm not kidding you, stomach cramps from excitement just
Speaker 3: because it looks so beautiful. But then looking at and
Speaker 3: retracing these abandoned tracks, it's a weird, kind of chilling
Speaker 3: reflection on late eighteen hundred's westward expansion in America. There's
Speaker 3: so much history there. Between eighteen seventy and nineteen hundred,
Speaker 3: the railroads helped millions of East Coast Americans and immigrants
Speaker 3: head west into the sunset, but not without a steep
Speaker 3: and just tragic price paid by native populations. And as
Speaker 3: long as we're brushing briefly up on American history, a
Speaker 3: note about the underground Railroad. Now, this was an escape
Speaker 3: network that freed, by some estimates, up to one hundred
Speaker 3: thousand slaves in America. Former slave abolitionist and activist Harry
Speaker 3: Tubman herself made thirteen trips to the South to free
Speaker 3: seventy slaves but fyi, the underground railroad was neither literally underground,
Speaker 3: nor was it a railroad. It was a secret movement, yes,
Speaker 3: and it used rail terminology as code, like the terms
Speaker 3: stations and conductors hence the day. So these are topics
Speaker 3: that deserve their own in depth future episodes, and they
Speaker 3: will get them. But anyway, go rail to trail yourself,
Speaker 3: because it's very beautiful.
Speaker 4: Theoretically, those corridors are then preserved, so if we find
Speaker 4: a need for the railroads later, we can put them
Speaker 4: back together and relay the track. But politically, I'm not
Speaker 4: sure how well that could happen, because people get so
Speaker 4: attached to those trails that they will not want the
Speaker 4: railroad to come back in if we ever get to
Speaker 4: that point. So who knows.
Speaker 3: And now, what happened in motor cities where you see
Speaker 3: kind of a robust rail line and then cars start
Speaker 3: to take over, like in Los Angeles? What happened to
Speaker 3: the train system in Los Angeles or Detroit once the
Speaker 3: automobile came around? Did it kind of phase it out
Speaker 3: more aggressively, more intentionally?
Speaker 4: Yeah, the automobile came a bad time for railroads, obviously
Speaker 4: bringing in all this change. But not long after the
Speaker 4: automobile peers on the scene, we have the Great Depression,
Speaker 4: where already we have railroad lines and streetcar operators suffering
Speaker 4: from losing traffic to the automobile, but now they've got
Speaker 4: this additional impact of the Great Depression. So they go
Speaker 4: through that period really not being able to invest in
Speaker 4: improve their equipment or improve the track and so forth.
Speaker 4: And then they get hit with World War Two, which
Speaker 4: all of a sudden there's now curbs on automobile transportations,
Speaker 4: there's rationing, so people aren't driving. They're going back to
Speaker 4: street cars, back to railroads, and now railroads, having suffered
Speaker 4: through the depression, are kind of getting beat by too
Speaker 4: much traffic. And you have to feel bad for some
Speaker 4: of the lines which thought that this is kind of
Speaker 4: a rebirth of railroad passenger service, so they invest in
Speaker 4: new equipment at this time. But then, of course, as
Speaker 4: soon as the war's over, everybody wants a new car
Speaker 4: and they get them, and then we're off fund the
Speaker 4: interstate highways and here we.
Speaker 3: Are, so to recap that, everyone said to trains like, later, loser,
Speaker 3: I'm in a car, and then they were like, never mind,
Speaker 3: I'm back. We can't have cars because everyone is off
Speaker 3: killing each other. And the rail system was like, ah,
Speaker 3: you came back to me. I'm so happy I made
Speaker 3: you dinner. I needed you a card again with our initials,
Speaker 3: I'm investing so much into myself for your return. And
Speaker 3: then the war was over and we were like, psych,
Speaker 3: you suck. I'm spending my American dollars on metal cars.
Speaker 3: And the railroads were like, heart, it is broken. So
Speaker 3: what's going to happen? Is there another act before the
Speaker 3: credits roll on our romance with trains? Now? Do you
Speaker 3: get excited about the future of rail like are you
Speaker 3: all up in hyper loop news or are you like
Speaker 3: I'm strictly like terrestrial railroad vintage style.
Speaker 4: You know, it's interesting to read about these new technologies
Speaker 4: hyper loop, maglev, whatever it might be. But then, you know,
Speaker 4: I also think that we've got to proven technology in
Speaker 4: the railroad with the infrastructure already built. And yeah, it
Speaker 4: would be cool to ride in something that goes four
Speaker 4: hundred miles an hour, but I'd be perfectly happy with
Speaker 4: one hundred and fifty miles on our traditional railroad route.
Speaker 4: So we'll see what happens.
Speaker 3: Before we can get off track. Let's just pump the
Speaker 3: brakes and cover quickly. How the hell does the train work? Okay,
Speaker 3: here's the deal, So super train enthusiasts, you are going
Speaker 3: to think this is too simple. If you notify me
Speaker 3: telling me that this impo is too broad, I will
Speaker 3: simply respond with a link to Wikipedia. I just needed
Speaker 3: to know the So I'm gonna give you guys really
Speaker 3: broad strokes. Now. The first, like air quotes, trains were
Speaker 3: just rutways in the roads in Roman times that carts
Speaker 3: could kind of just shimmey down with ease. And then
Speaker 3: in the fifteen hundreds in Germany they started pulling bins
Speaker 3: full of stuff on tracks by hands, and they called
Speaker 3: these huns. One hundred years later they were like, this
Speaker 3: is bull crap. Let's use horses, and they made things
Speaker 3: called wagonways. Now, in the seventeen hundreds, a Scottish dude
Speaker 3: named James Watt invented the steam engine. Coal or wood
Speaker 3: is burned, which heats water, which powers motors to do things.
Speaker 3: Cut to eighteen oh four, the first steam locomotive hauled
Speaker 3: iron in Wales, and then by the eighteen thirties they
Speaker 3: were like, well, shoot, let's stuff some people in these
Speaker 3: ding Dan cars, and then in the late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 3: other power sources started cropping up, like electric diesel engines.
Speaker 3: Twenties nineteen thirties, diesel starts to take over. It's cleaner
Speaker 3: and more efficient, and steam engines begin to decline. Now
Speaker 3: electric powered subways and streetcars. They work by running on
Speaker 3: rails and they grab power from the third rail or
Speaker 3: from wires overhead. Bullet trains like those in Japan and France,
Speaker 3: which rule those start cropping up in the late nineteen
Speaker 3: sixties nineteen seventies. They have speeds of over two hundred
Speaker 3: kilometers per hour. That's almost one hundred and forty miles
Speaker 3: per hour. That was a big deal back then. And
Speaker 3: then maglev trains kind of rounded the corner in a blur.
Speaker 3: If you're like, what is a maglev? Maglev is short
Speaker 3: for magnetic levitation, and that's because it's a floating in
Speaker 3: air people. Welcome to the future. So magnets levitate the
Speaker 3: train just a little bit, and then another set of
Speaker 3: magnets pull it forward. And the first commercial maglev train
Speaker 3: debuted in Shanghai on New Year's Day two thousand and four,
Speaker 3: and the latest train speed record was set by a
Speaker 3: Japanese maglev bullet train in twenty fifteen that went six
Speaker 3: hundred and three kilometers per hour, That is three hundred
Speaker 3: and seventy five miles per hour.
Speaker 1: Perty good, perty purty, pirty perty good.
Speaker 3: It's not as good as like a Boeing seven forty seven,
Speaker 3: which has a cruising speed of like five hundred and
Speaker 3: fifty miles per hour, or as fast as an actual
Speaker 3: bullet which rolls at like seventeen hundred miles per hour.
Speaker 3: But personally, I'd rather ride the rails than deal with
Speaker 3: flight delace or I guess if we're following this comparison,
Speaker 3: a very fast gunshot. So way to go maglev. Now
Speaker 3: what's next. A lot of folks are working to make
Speaker 3: Elon Musk's hyper loop fever dreams a reality. Now this
Speaker 3: would be modular passenger pods that speed they hope at
Speaker 3: like seven hundred mi miles per hour in a vacuum
Speaker 3: chambered tube propelled by maglev. Now tests are happening in
Speaker 3: Nevada deserts all over the world. They're trying to figure
Speaker 3: this out. I for one, am ready for this miracle
Speaker 3: of speed to happen to my travel, but but I
Speaker 3: guess that would mean less epically long train journeys. What's
Speaker 3: the longest train trip you've ever taken.
Speaker 4: I've taken several trips from say this part of the
Speaker 4: country out to Washington, d C. So not long. This
Speaker 4: is not going over the whole country. But you know,
Speaker 4: it's a nice overnight trip. You don't get too cramped
Speaker 4: in the train, and you wake up, you're refreshed, and
Speaker 4: you know you've gotten there and you've traveled when you
Speaker 4: otherwise would have been sleeping. So it's not as though
Speaker 4: you lose any time on an overnight train trip like that.
Speaker 3: I was going to do a helpful aside here about
Speaker 3: how if you do overnights, get the sleeper car, blah
Speaker 3: blah blah, it's worth it. But the real news is
Speaker 3: that I found out that a lot of trains have
Speaker 3: a hopper system for the toilets, which mean they just
Speaker 3: dump it out raw on the tracks, like bye bye.
Speaker 3: And I found that out from a site called toiletguru
Speaker 3: dot com, where this one random dude just answers everyone's
Speaker 3: questions about toilets. And on that site, I also learned
Speaker 3: that Hitler's toilet resides in a very Grimy auto repair
Speaker 3: shop in Florence, New Jersey, where it was actively casually
Speaker 3: in use for years. And that's very weird and also
Speaker 3: fitting for someone who has a legacy of being the
Speaker 3: world's biggest turd. Anyway, let's get into some nuts and
Speaker 3: bolts of interesting terminology, train language, trainlage. If you will,
Speaker 3: shall we? Okay? Can you give me a little bit
Speaker 3: of an overview of what a train is? Because I
Speaker 3: learned recently that the train and the locomotive are two
Speaker 3: different things. Train enthusiasts are like, how dare you not
Speaker 3: know that? But can you give me the parts of
Speaker 3: a train anatomy?
Speaker 4: Yes, nothing drives a paraoeconologists more crazy than people calling
Speaker 4: locomotives trains. But yes, the locomotive is just the engine,
Speaker 4: whether it's a diesel electric or a steam locomotive, that
Speaker 4: in itself is not a train. It's not until you
Speaker 4: couple cars to it that you have a train. So
Speaker 4: it's the locomotive and the freight cars, the passenger cars,
Speaker 4: whatever it might be. All of those together form a train.
Speaker 3: And now what's that caboos doing? Is it? Whatever? The
Speaker 3: last car is a caboose or does a kabooz have
Speaker 3: to be read and cute.
Speaker 4: Cabooses tend to be read and cute, just because red
Speaker 4: was a fairly inexpensive paint color and it was highly visible,
Speaker 4: and the point is to make the end of the
Speaker 4: train visible to following trains in case of some kind
Speaker 4: of emergency stop or something. But yeah, the caboose is
Speaker 4: much lamented. Those started to fade away by the late
Speaker 4: seventies early eighties. Now they're all but extinct, except for
Speaker 4: local trains or maybe moving through rail yards or something.
Speaker 4: But yeah, every time I see a train go by
Speaker 4: without a caboose, it feels like, you know, reading a
Speaker 4: sentence without the period at the end. It's just not complete.
Speaker 3: It's like texting grammar.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3: What okay, I never knew that. Also, I just looked
Speaker 3: it up and the word caboose was lifted from ship
Speaker 3: talk that was the little room that sailors would cook in,
Speaker 3: probably from some Dutch word, and it's used in train
Speaker 3: language because the caboose was the hangout car for the crew.
Speaker 3: Isn't that cute? They're like, I'll be in the back,
Speaker 3: gonna go kick it in the last car. Also in
Speaker 3: Bronx Pennsylvania. There's a place called the Red Kaboos Motel
Speaker 3: that began when a guy in the nineteen sixties on
Speaker 3: a dare bid on nineteen cabooses in an auction and
Speaker 3: to his shock, learned that he won them. So he
Speaker 3: was like, uh. He turned him into a hotel at
Speaker 3: which you can still stay. It's like one hundred and
Speaker 3: sixteen dollars a night. They also have a honeymoon sweet
Speaker 3: caboose with a jacuzzi tub. Just saying I think you
Speaker 3: should spend your wedding night there. You don't have to
Speaker 3: take the suggestion, but maybe you should. But really like
Speaker 3: check the Yelp reviews first, because I don't want to
Speaker 3: run anything. Now, what happens when trained enthusiasts or pharaoh
Speaker 3: or fellow pharaoh equnologists get together? What are those parties? Like?
Speaker 4: They're pretty fun. You know, there's a lot of slide
Speaker 4: showing and nowadays, you know, show your pictures on the computer.
Speaker 4: What have your joe? You know, look at this train
Speaker 4: I rode, or look at this great photo of the
Speaker 4: composition of the image that I captured. You know, I
Speaker 4: waited in the rain for three hours to get this shot.
Speaker 4: And that's what they do, or there's talk about the
Speaker 4: history of railroads, or a lot of them are model railroaders,
Speaker 4: so they talk about what they've been doing out there,
Speaker 4: or show you the latest improvements of the model road,
Speaker 4: or you dream a little bit about things you'd like
Speaker 4: to do, like to see railroads in China were still
Speaker 4: using steam until very recently. You know, people will travel
Speaker 4: to those places just to have that experience.
Speaker 3: Okay, now what about model trains. Do people like the
Speaker 3: hands on experience? Maybe we all love playing god a little.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the model railroad allows you to kind of play trains,
Speaker 4: to live out that that fantasy that you've always had.
Speaker 4: You know, as a kid, I had model trains. I
Speaker 4: didn't do much more than just run them around as
Speaker 4: fast as I could for fun. But some of these
Speaker 4: modelers they get seriously into it, you know, in that
Speaker 4: they actually run freight on their model railroad, and they
Speaker 4: dispatch the trains and they switch out the cars. You know,
Speaker 4: heaven forbid you touch a car, pick it up by hand.
Speaker 4: You've got to move it, just like the railroad with
Speaker 4: a locomotive. So that's pretty serious stuff. You know, It's
Speaker 4: still play, but at a far more advanced level than
Speaker 4: what we were doing as kids.
Speaker 3: So the Henry Ford Museum has this whole area of
Speaker 3: model trains overseen by at least when I last went,
Speaker 3: some kind white haired gents who were eager, as I'll
Speaker 3: get out to answer questions. So my main question was
Speaker 3: do you ever get on the tables and stomp on
Speaker 3: these like Godzilla? But I wanted to preserve the mystery,
Speaker 3: so I didn't ask, when you are taking care of
Speaker 3: the locomotives here, which you have known personally since you
Speaker 3: were like six, what does that involve? Because the locomotives
Speaker 3: that you have at the Ford are massive. What do
Speaker 3: you have to do to keep those up? Do you
Speaker 3: have to dust them? Do you have to make sure
Speaker 3: that squirrels don't live in them? What do you have
Speaker 3: oil them? What happens?
Speaker 4: We are lucky in that a lot of our signature locomotives,
Speaker 4: particularly the Allegheny, that massive. When we have on the
Speaker 4: floor that has always been inside for as long as
Speaker 4: we've had it, and that's one of the real challenges
Speaker 4: with rail preservation. These things are just so big, and
Speaker 4: you leave them outside, they get exposed to weather and
Speaker 4: over time they're going to degrade. So We're lucky there's
Speaker 4: not too much we have to do with the Allegheny
Speaker 4: other than maybe dust it off a little bit, or
Speaker 4: because the cab is open and kids can climb up there,
Speaker 4: we've got to make sure that there's no damage. We
Speaker 4: have replaced all the controls with replicas, so you know,
Speaker 4: if something gets broken, it's not damaging an original piece.
Speaker 4: It's a different story for our operating steam railroad out
Speaker 4: in Greenfield Village there, we do have a crew of
Speaker 4: locomotive specialists who are out there working on those locomotives
Speaker 4: every day, maintaining them, oiling them, cleaning them, cleaning out
Speaker 4: the ash, doing regular maintenance with them. And we like
Speaker 4: to say out there we're not just preserving the equipment,
Speaker 4: we're preserving the skills. I mean, there's nowhere else in
Speaker 4: the country other than at railroad museums where people are
Speaker 4: doing that kind of work every day.
Speaker 3: Oh that's a good point. So hot tip, Pharaoh equa
Speaker 3: files to work in a ding dang museum. Dig into
Speaker 3: your scrapbooks. I feel like an employer can't turn you
Speaker 3: down if you have a picture of yourself as a
Speaker 3: human puppy sitting on their exhibit, like legally they can't say, no,
Speaker 3: how many trains in locomotives you have here at the museum,
Speaker 3: and do you have a favorite?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I would pick My favorite would be the sentimental one,
Speaker 4: the Allegaty, which I think a lot of people would
Speaker 4: pick as our favorite just because it's so massive. But
Speaker 4: we have a large collection here. We've got off the
Speaker 4: top of my head, we have about seven or so locomotives,
Speaker 4: closer to ten when you count the diesel electrics. A
Speaker 4: few of them operate, most of them are just static displays.
Speaker 4: And then we have several cars beyond that, passenger cars,
Speaker 4: freight cars, box cars. We have two cabooses, for example,
Speaker 4: and they run the gamut from a replica of an
Speaker 4: eighteen sixty Civil War era passenger coach up to Henry
Speaker 4: Ford's private railcar that he used, which was the equivalent
Speaker 4: of the lear jet of the nineteen teens in nineteen twenties.
Speaker 3: Wait, you could have your own private railcar where you're
Speaker 3: just like, hey, I'm going to roll up with my railcar.
Speaker 3: Take me over here. It's like your second home.
Speaker 4: Yes, if you had sufficient means, you could buy your
Speaker 4: own railcar. I think he paid something like one hundred
Speaker 4: and fifty thousand and four, which sounds like a bargain today,
Speaker 4: but of course in nineteen fifteen sixteen, that would have
Speaker 4: been big money.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, god, FYI, I asked a website, and
Speaker 3: by today's standards, that would be equivalent to a train
Speaker 3: car costing three point seven million dollars, which is like
Speaker 3: the cost of a small private jet. Yeah that's Oprah money.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And they would just put it onto
Speaker 4: the back of a regularly scheduled train and you could
Speaker 4: ride in privacy off to New York or Washington wherever
Speaker 4: you might be going.
Speaker 3: Oh that's the way to live. I mean, it is
Speaker 3: funny that a dude who pretty much invented the automotive industry,
Speaker 3: it was like, I'm just going to hop a train.
Speaker 3: We do them both. Now, where do you guys get
Speaker 3: these locomotives? Do you buy them on Craigslist? Where do
Speaker 3: they come from?
Speaker 4: We've gotten them from a variety of places. The Allegheny
Speaker 4: again as an example, we got from the CNO Railway itself,
Speaker 4: the company that bought that locomotive. And it's a great
Speaker 4: story with that engine because the CNO hauled coal, so
Speaker 4: you know, they were resistant to adoptees a electric locomotives.
Speaker 4: They stuck with steam because of some loyalty to their
Speaker 4: primary business there. But the Alleghany was built in nineteen
Speaker 4: forty one. We got it in nineteen fifty six ers.
Speaker 4: So that's you know, fifteen years of operation, which is
Speaker 4: not long at all for a locomotive. Typically they'll run
Speaker 4: for decades, not just fifteen years.
Speaker 3: This was retired just four years older than my current
Speaker 3: two thousand and seven PRIs.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they kind of gave up the ghost on Cole
Speaker 4: decided to move to diesel electrics, so we got that
Speaker 4: from the railroad. We've got another locomotive, which we got
Speaker 4: from a local energy company here which used it as
Speaker 4: a switching locomotive in their own yard. We've got other
Speaker 4: pieces that have come in some cases from private collectors,
Speaker 4: people who bought this equipment and then for whatever reason,
Speaker 4: decided they didn't want it anymore, then gave it to us.
Speaker 3: Have you ever cried about a train?
Speaker 4: I have cried sometimes about just the passing of the
Speaker 4: railroad in general. Like I talked about those two lines
Speaker 4: that grew up in my hometown. You know, I had
Speaker 4: a favorite between the two and of course, the favorite
Speaker 4: is the one that's abandoned now. So you know, it's
Speaker 4: sad to think because I would just love to be
Speaker 4: able to ride that line again, to go that route,
Speaker 4: travel that distance, and I think it probably is never
Speaker 4: coming back at this point, so it's just just exists
Speaker 4: in memory.
Speaker 3: I wonder if a lot of people do long, transc
Speaker 3: undental hikes on abandoned railroads. I know that you said
Speaker 3: that they were turning them maybe into trails, but if
Speaker 3: anyone's like, I'm going to traverse the country based on
Speaker 3: the old rail lines, there.
Speaker 4: Are people who do that. And you know, rail lines
Speaker 4: really do make ideal hiking trails because they go off
Speaker 4: into some very wild areas. You get some beautiful scenic
Speaker 4: views that you can't get from the expressway or anywhere else.
Speaker 4: And also because they're designed for railers, they tend to
Speaker 4: be fairly leveled too, that the grades are not steep,
Speaker 4: they're very gentle.
Speaker 3: Did you watch Stami Me as a kid.
Speaker 4: I did, Yes. I think about that scene when they're
Speaker 4: on the bridge they're running from the locomotive. Yeah, we've
Speaker 4: all had nightmares like that.
Speaker 3: I think, have you ever gone to drive a locomotive?
Speaker 4: I have. Actually I got a chance to fire on
Speaker 4: a steam locomotive once, which hotter than hell, if I'm
Speaker 4: saying miserable. In fact, our own crew, it's been in
Speaker 4: the nineties here in the Detroit area the last couple
Speaker 4: of days. They were talking about in the cab. They
Speaker 4: measured it at one hundred and thirty five hundred and
Speaker 4: thirty six degrees I think. And they're working in those
Speaker 4: conditions throughout the day, so a lot of water and
Speaker 4: a lot of rest breaks. But yes, I got to
Speaker 4: shovel coal into a locomotive, which is far more challenging
Speaker 4: that you might think. It's not just shoveling coal into
Speaker 4: the hole and that's it. You've got to get that
Speaker 4: coal spread evenly inside the firebox. So there's some real
Speaker 4: skill in it. And I also got to operate a
Speaker 4: diesel electric locomotive, which is a lot of fun. And
Speaker 4: the big takeaway from me from that was how quickly
Speaker 4: those locomotives can get away from you, even the slightest
Speaker 4: till you pick up speed very quickly, and you start
Speaker 4: to realize what a skill it is to control that
Speaker 4: much weight. And you know, I was just running the locomotive,
Speaker 4: no cars behind it, so it would have been even
Speaker 4: more difficult in that situation.
Speaker 3: So side note. I got to drive a locomotive once,
Speaker 3: just like a few hundred feet on a test track,
Speaker 3: and I just hooted the horn the entire time, and
Speaker 3: I have no regrets. How do they test people's ability
Speaker 3: to drive a locomotive, because that seems like a thing
Speaker 3: like you can't just go practice at a church parking lot,
Speaker 3: like when you're getting your drivers, Like, how do you
Speaker 3: learn how to do that without killing everyone?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's equivalent to an apprentice program, whether it's on
Speaker 4: the actual operating business railroads or on a railroad like
Speaker 4: ours here at Greenfield Village. You know, you've learned under
Speaker 4: the study of someone who knows what they're doing, and
Speaker 4: you learn by doing, going through the experience, practicing, and eventually,
Speaker 4: you know, you get to the point where you don't
Speaker 4: need the apprentice supervision anymore and you're off on your own.
Speaker 3: Who so you just have to watch over someone's shoulder.
Speaker 3: It's kind of like learning to be a surgeon, I
Speaker 3: guess also, and I had nowhere else in this episode
Speaker 3: to put it, so I'm just going to add it here.
Speaker 3: The Hogwarts Express train is an actual steam locomotive in Scotland.
Speaker 3: You can ride it. It's called the Jacobite and it
Speaker 3: even crosses the bridge to Hogwarts, which is a twenty
Speaker 3: one arch viaduct. Just in case you're like, oh no,
Speaker 3: my bucket list, I have done all the items. Well
Speaker 3: there's new one, kiddos. Okay, let's get to the rapid
Speaker 3: fire around. But before we take questions from you, our
Speaker 3: beloved listeners, we're going to take a quick break for
Speaker 3: sponsors of the show. Sponsors. Why sponsors, You know what
Speaker 3: they do? They help us give money to different share
Speaker 3: every week. So if you want to know where Ologies
Speaker 3: gives our money, you can go to alleyword dot com
Speaker 3: and look for the tab Ologies gives back. There's like
Speaker 3: one hundred and fifty different charities that we've given to already,
Speaker 3: with more every single week. So if you need a
Speaker 3: place to go, donate a little bit of money but
Speaker 3: you're not sure where to go. Those are all picked
Speaker 3: biologists who work in those fields, and this ad break
Speaker 3: allows us to give a ton of money to them.
Speaker 3: So thanks for listening and think sponsors.
Speaker 2: Your flat out and your to do list is growing
Speaker 2: by the minute. But unfortunately so is your headache, and
Speaker 2: now you've gone from flat out to flattened. Luckily, Panadal
Speaker 2: extra film coated tablets are boosted by caffeine and they
Speaker 2: get to work in as little as ten minutes for
Speaker 2: powerful relief. That's more than just paracetamol. That's one for
Speaker 2: panadal speed based on absorption data. Contains paracetamol. Always read
Speaker 2: the label or leaflet.
Speaker 3: Okay, your question. We got a truly staggering number of questions. Okay,
Speaker 3: Spencer Toth wants to know why was I told as
Speaker 3: a child that putting salt on a train track was illegal?
Speaker 4: That's an interesting question. I would say it's probably because
Speaker 4: putting anything on a train track is illegal. You know, theoretically,
Speaker 4: even being near the train track is illegal. It's private property.
Speaker 3: Oh no, oops, this gets sad.
Speaker 4: The railroad owns that corridor and for obvious reasons. I mean,
Speaker 4: it's very dangerous to walk too close to those when
Speaker 4: a train is coming, and it's surprising the number of
Speaker 4: pedestrian fatalities there are. And you know, theoretically, anybody in
Speaker 4: that situation, it's the pedestrian's faul because they shouldn't have
Speaker 4: been there in the first place. But now we have
Speaker 4: people who are you know, tuned out of the world,
Speaker 4: listening to their iPhones and so forth. And yeah, even
Speaker 4: for as large as they are, you know, a fast
Speaker 4: moving train can sneak up on you much faster than
Speaker 4: you might think.
Speaker 3: So, right, so it's illegal to breathe on a rail.
Speaker 4: He would be theoretically, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Just in case you're like tempting the grim Reaper by
Speaker 3: train sounds relatively unthreatening. Just please know that the Federal
Speaker 3: Rail Administration says that train related deaths are at a
Speaker 3: ten year high. Almost nine hundred people in the US
Speaker 3: were killed due to train related incidents last year, five
Speaker 3: hundred and seventy five of them trespassers abundantly in their
Speaker 3: twenties and thirties, walking on active tracks or hopping freight trains.
Speaker 3: And I went to do a little bit more research,
Speaker 3: which landed me on a Wikipedia page called list of
Speaker 3: selfie related injuries and Deaths. And it was really sad.
Speaker 3: I could not read through it all. Let's just say
Speaker 3: I did glance and I saw the word train a lot. So, kiddos,
Speaker 3: playing on trains is statistically one hundred times more likely
Speaker 3: to kill you than a shark. If I may get
Speaker 3: some lack of morphological on you. Now, if you want
Speaker 3: a selfie with a train, go to a museum. Don't
Speaker 3: do any trespassing on any tracks. Okay, that's because I
Speaker 3: care about you, love dad.
Speaker 4: Really, the only place you can be is if you're
Speaker 4: at a crossing. In that case, you shouldn't be stopping you.
Speaker 4: You should be just crossing and going about your business.
Speaker 3: So no salts on train tracks. Also, no people on
Speaker 3: train tracks. Al Martinez wants to know what's the current
Speaker 3: thinking on high speed rail in the US, both across
Speaker 3: the country in high population states such as California, Florida, Texas.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we've got some movement toward high speed rail here,
Speaker 4: though our high speed rail is a shadow of what
Speaker 4: they have in Europe, where they're doing two hundred miles
Speaker 4: an hour or better. Here, you know, one hundred and
Speaker 4: twenty miles is considered pretty high speed, and we've had
Speaker 4: some success in short corridors. The difficulty is that Amtrak
Speaker 4: runs on a lot of freight owned railroads, and of
Speaker 4: course the freight operators want to run freight trains on
Speaker 4: there too, and high speed passenger trains and slower speed
Speaker 4: freight trains don't mix well as you might imagine.
Speaker 3: Whoa That speed difference was news to me, although thinking
Speaker 3: of huge bins of coal on like a bullet train
Speaker 3: does seem a little excessive.
Speaker 4: That's why, really the Northeast Corridor between Washington and Boston
Speaker 4: now is really the showpiece because Amtrak owns most of
Speaker 4: that right of way, so they can run at whatever
Speaker 4: speeds they want.
Speaker 3: Oh, I never knew that. I always wondered why California's
Speaker 3: train game was just so poor.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, they have to share the space. And of
Speaker 4: course those and a lot of cases those tracks were
Speaker 4: built or at least the right of ways were laid
Speaker 4: out in the nineteenth century, so they were designed for
Speaker 4: slower speeds, and if you want to run at higher speeds,
Speaker 4: you need longer, straighter stretches to track more gentle curves,
Speaker 4: so a lot of that has to be rebuilt. That's
Speaker 4: why it's just in some cases simpler to build a
Speaker 4: brand new track, like they're doing with the high speed
Speaker 4: rail out in California.
Speaker 3: Just quick aside, I figured he was talking about the hyperloop,
Speaker 3: but there's a different high speed rail. In twenty fifteen,
Speaker 3: workers in Fresno California broke round on an electric California
Speaker 3: high speed rail that'll cost maybe one hundred billion dollars,
Speaker 3: but it may be done in twenty thirty. Train expectations
Speaker 3: are so low in LA that we're just like, that's fine,
Speaker 3: We're fine riding motorized razor scooters in traffic while y'all
Speaker 3: work it out. PA fox Hall wants to know, why
Speaker 3: is there such a huge variation in train track sizes
Speaker 3: and whips all over the world. Why isn't there more standardization? Essentially, Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's a great question. That was a problem here in
Speaker 3: the United States. In fact, it's one of the major
Speaker 3: factors that cited for the reason that the South loss
Speaker 3: of the Civil War is that they had a missmash
Speaker 3: different track sizes, some of them five feet wide, some
Speaker 3: of them six feet wide, some of them the standard
Speaker 3: four feet eight and a half inches, or in the
Speaker 3: North they tended all to be the same gauge, so
Speaker 3: you could move a car from one railroad line to
Speaker 3: another without having to stop and unload everything and reload it.
Speaker 4: No. Around the world, You're right, there are different standards,
Speaker 4: and often it's just based on local preference. I mean
Speaker 4: here in the us, we have four feet eight and
Speaker 4: a half inches because a lot of what we learned
Speaker 4: we learned from Great Britain, where they use four feet
Speaker 4: eight and a half inches for their gauge, and it
Speaker 4: seems to be on the whole sort of the ideal.
Speaker 4: Anything wider than that gets to be kind of difficult
Speaker 4: to cumbersome. Anything more narrow than that you can't carry
Speaker 4: as much freight, So you know, for whatever reason, that's
Speaker 4: that's what we've gone with.
Speaker 3: Is that a more round number in metric, or four
Speaker 3: feet eight and a half inches.
Speaker 4: Is very specific, it is, and it's really not anymore
Speaker 4: round in metric.
Speaker 3: I never knew that about the Civil War. That's amazing. Also,
Speaker 3: four feet eight point five inches rounds two and also
Speaker 3: nonsensical one hundred and forty three point five to one centimeters.
Speaker 3: So okay, he says.
Speaker 4: The story I've heard is that that was the width
Speaker 4: of and I think it's just a myth, But the
Speaker 4: width of the wheels on Roman chariots, we're about four
Speaker 4: feet eight and a half inches and nets like the
Speaker 4: width that accommodates two horses. Who knows.
Speaker 3: Okay, I was curious is this accurate? And how wide
Speaker 3: are horse butts. So I did a little investigating and
Speaker 3: I found a paper titled Morphometric Measurements and Animal Performance
Speaker 3: Indices in a study of forms of Brazilian support horses
Speaker 3: undergoing training for a venting, and according to their statistics,
Speaker 3: point five to five meters was the average width of
Speaker 3: a horse butt, which converts to one point eight feet,
Speaker 3: so times two horses is three point six feet with
Speaker 3: fourteen point five inches a little over a foot between
Speaker 3: the horse butts for tail swishing.
Speaker 4: I suppose, for whatever reason though, that's the number that
Speaker 4: we settled on. You know, one number is as good
Speaker 4: as any frankly, as long as every track is the
Speaker 4: same number.
Speaker 3: So wow, I wonder if there's a they have special
Speaker 3: yard sticks when they're putting that together, Like, how do
Speaker 3: they make sure they do.
Speaker 4: We've got out on our road. We've got gage rods,
Speaker 4: which are just metal pieces that are measured to exactly
Speaker 4: four feet eight and a half inches, and that's i
Speaker 4: should say, measured from the inside surface of the rail,
Speaker 4: not from the center of the rail or something. So
Speaker 4: we can put that out there and check every so
Speaker 4: often to make sure that our track is in perfect gauge.
Speaker 4: It's obviously a problem if the gauge gets a little wide.
Speaker 4: You know that the wheels are wide and compensated, but
Speaker 4: if it gets two wide, you've got a car on
Speaker 4: the ground, and that can be a big problem.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that's a pretty big, heavy problem. What are
Speaker 3: the railroad ties made out of?
Speaker 4: For the most part, they're made out of wood treated
Speaker 4: wood treated with creosote, usually to prevent rotting or where
Speaker 4: to make them last a little longer. And the kind
Speaker 4: of wood they use varies and be oak, it might
Speaker 4: be pined, just whatever might be available locally. They have
Speaker 4: in some cases moved toward concrete ties, particularly with higher
Speaker 4: speed roads, just because those last a little longer and
Speaker 4: they're less prone to kind of stretching and shrinking in
Speaker 4: the heat.
Speaker 3: There's something about creosote that smells so good. I don't
Speaker 3: know why.
Speaker 4: It's a classic railroad smell. Yeah, the coal smoke and
Speaker 4: the creosote.
Speaker 3: Oh for sure. Did anyone make a country song about
Speaker 3: that cole smoking KOREASO?
Speaker 4: If they haven't, they should so.
Speaker 3: Side note, there are some good sad country songs about
Speaker 3: trains I found out, like Willie Nelson's City of New
Speaker 3: Orleans about the flagging power of the rail system in America,
Speaker 3: But in terms of wheepcore, perhaps nothing could beat the
Speaker 3: George strait Diddy called trains make me lonesome, And the.
Speaker 5: Next thing that we knew, some old train came passing through.
Speaker 4: Han Daddy got home.
Speaker 5: And we ain't seen him. Noder, Trains make me long lonesome.
Speaker 3: I got so so sad for George straight and that
Speaker 3: I just started reading about his history. But George, what
Speaker 3: the hell? According to Wikipedia, when George was in the
Speaker 3: fourth grade, his father and mother were divorced, his mother
Speaker 3: moved away, George and his brother were raised by their father. Dude, George,
Speaker 3: you just threw your dad under the bus or the
Speaker 3: train so hard with that song. Now, in the name
Speaker 3: of single dads everywhere, I hope at some point George
Speaker 3: bought his daddy a three point seven million dollar train car.
Speaker 3: Is just an apology, all right? Onward? Also, this next
Speaker 3: question is from your favorite Mars expert from the Areology episode. Okay,
Speaker 3: Jennifer Booz wants to know why do the trains go
Speaker 3: too fast sometimes and derail? Is there not a good
Speaker 3: way to limit the speed on certain parts of the track.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so this is an issue now, that we've been
Speaker 4: dealing with the last ten years or so in the
Speaker 4: US the adoption of positive train control, and one of
Speaker 4: the advantages railroads have over any other kind of transportation, frankly,
Speaker 4: is that they are on a fixed guideway. They're on rails,
Speaker 4: so theoretically there should be some automatic way to stop
Speaker 4: them without worrying about them swerving and crashing off the
Speaker 4: side of the road. And what we're trying to do
Speaker 4: now is pass legislation that will put in automatic control
Speaker 4: units in a locomotive cab so that if the signal
Speaker 4: the equivalent of a stoplight on a highway is read
Speaker 4: and the engineer, for whatever reason, disregards that signal and
Speaker 4: does not stop, the locomotive will automatically lose power, slow down,
Speaker 4: and stop. But we're facing some of the same problems
Speaker 4: that they did when they tried to make all the
Speaker 4: tracks the same gauge. You know, every railroad uses a
Speaker 4: different system, and to try and get everything to work
Speaker 4: universally is taking a lot of money in a lot
Speaker 4: of time, more so than we might have anticipated. But
Speaker 4: it would make us safer, I think, and prevent some
Speaker 4: of the accidents we've seen in recent years.
Speaker 3: Right, it must. I mean when you see the news
Speaker 3: and it's like there was a trained derailment that was
Speaker 3: possibly influenced by texting, you're like, oh my god, that
Speaker 3: was not a problem in the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, it's Yeah. It's frightening enough when you hear
Speaker 4: about people driving and texting, but when you're in a
Speaker 4: railroad situation is just it's a warrant because you know
Speaker 4: that the engineer is a professional. You trust the crew
Speaker 4: to deliver people safely, and if somebody on the crew
Speaker 4: is texting, it's just it is a dereliction of duty.
Speaker 4: And those kinds of distractions The railroads police very very thoroughly,
Speaker 4: and I mean that's a fireable offense. If you're caught
Speaker 4: doing that, there's no second chance.
Speaker 3: Oh sure, yeah, I imagine you can't even like eat
Speaker 3: a sandwich when you're operating a train.
Speaker 4: Yeah, when you're there that you've got the one job
Speaker 4: to do and that's what you better be doing.
Speaker 3: Right, like smoothies only no hummus and chip dip too involved. Okay.
Speaker 3: Lindsay Loeper wants to know why were villains and old
Speaker 3: movies always trying people to railroad tracks? Was this something
Speaker 3: people were actually afraid of. That's a great question, you know.
Speaker 3: I frankly, I'm not aware of any specific incident in
Speaker 3: history where someone was tied to a railroad track by
Speaker 3: a villain. It may have happened, but you know, I
Speaker 3: think it's become kind of a Hollywood trope, and it
Speaker 3: probably comes back to the early silent movies when that
Speaker 3: was done. But railroads were seen as dangerous as they
Speaker 3: are dangerous if you're trespassing her in the wrong place.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, a short distance away, Whiplash was up to his
Speaker 1: favorite past time, tying women to railroad tracks.
Speaker 3: Wait wait, wait wait, Okay, So, according to the Straight Dope,
Speaker 3: these incidents have happened, but the victims tended to be men,
Speaker 3: and they occurred after this crime was popularized in fiction
Speaker 3: in dozens of plays, the first of which was an
Speaker 3: eighteen sixty three British production called The Engineer. Now, a
Speaker 3: bunch of historians think this was a way for us
Speaker 3: to comprehend our own fears just about the power of industry.
Speaker 3: So getting tied to the tracks with a train barreling
Speaker 3: at you is kind of like an old timey black mirror,
Speaker 3: but like a CPA toned looking glass if you will.
Speaker 4: It seems like, I think, a good way. And it
Speaker 4: builds up the drama too in the movie, because you
Speaker 4: see the train in the distance, you see it coming,
Speaker 4: you see the heroin or whomever it might be, struggling
Speaker 4: to get out. So I guess it's a great trope,
Speaker 4: but yeah, one that's been around a long time.
Speaker 3: Never trust a curly mustache exactly. That's your first clue.
Speaker 3: This guy's got some rope and a curly mustache. You're
Speaker 3: gonna end up on a train track.
Speaker 4: Look out for snidely whiplash.
Speaker 3: Julie Noble wants to know, how is it the people
Speaker 3: who live near tracks don't hear the trains anymore? Do
Speaker 3: you think that people get so used to it that
Speaker 3: it just becomes like part of breathing for them?
Speaker 4: If I may quote one of my favorite movies, The
Speaker 4: Blues Brothers, that's seen where they go to Elwood's apartment
Speaker 4: and he's by the l there in Chicago, Jake says,
Speaker 4: how often does the train go by? Elwood says, so
Speaker 4: often you won't notice. I think there's some truth to that.
Speaker 4: I myself, I live on near the airport, so you know,
Speaker 4: we have airplanes flying over fairly constantly. At a certain point,
Speaker 4: you just tune them out, you know, they become background noise.
Speaker 4: We can get used to a lot of different things.
Speaker 4: It's the same for people who live along the railroad tracks,
Speaker 4: and you kind of get used to it and the
Speaker 4: sound just eventually fades away and disappears and buried in
Speaker 4: your subconscious.
Speaker 3: Now. For more on this, look up neural adaptation or
Speaker 3: sensory adaptation. The first Google results use living close to
Speaker 3: train tracks as an actual example. Right, I live it
Speaker 3: on Busy Street, and I'm sure there are so many
Speaker 3: more ambulances than I realized. But yeah, Julie Noble says,
Speaker 3: I live a block and a half from a track,
Speaker 3: and we'll be on the phone, windows closed, and the
Speaker 3: other person will say, oh my god, is that a train?
Speaker 3: And I seriously don't notice that? All right, Carrie's true.
Speaker 3: I wants to know why do commuter trains like Chicago's
Speaker 3: Metro have to rent track time from the rail road lines.
Speaker 3: So I guess there's freight interference during rush hour. That's
Speaker 3: kind of what you were talking about.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, there's been a big shift, you know, the
Speaker 4: railroads as soon as they started losing money on passenger business,
Speaker 4: which really goes back to the twenties, if not before,
Speaker 4: But railroads got out of the passenger business, especially after
Speaker 4: the highway system in the late nineteen fifties through the sixties.
Speaker 4: Amtrak came on the scene in nineteen seventy one. And yes,
Speaker 4: Amtrak basically is a tenant or a guest on the
Speaker 4: freight railroad. Now, theoretically the freight railroad just supposed to
Speaker 4: give referential treatment to Amtrak, but in the real world
Speaker 4: it doesn't always work out that way.
Speaker 3: I had no idea that that was like a shared situe.
Speaker 3: They have like a time share on the tracks. Essentially,
Speaker 3: am I the only one who thought that Amtrak has
Speaker 3: been around for like a century? Okay, John Worster, I
Speaker 3: love this question, says, back in the day, railroads seem
Speaker 3: to have become the authority for setting the correct time
Speaker 3: and history.
Speaker 4: How did that happen? Yes, and that's one of the
Speaker 4: railroad's legacies that's with us today, standard time and time
Speaker 4: zones in the United States. You know, prior to that,
Speaker 4: every town kind of decided noon was whenever the sun
Speaker 4: was the highest point over city hall, the church, whatever
Speaker 4: it might be so you know, that's fine if you
Speaker 4: live in a world that's only you know, maybe fifteen
Speaker 4: twenty mile radius, but not so good when you're on
Speaker 4: railroads where time, especially in those days before they had
Speaker 4: electronic signaling, you know, the timetable was absolute. If a
Speaker 4: train had to go by at one ten PM, then
Speaker 4: it better be there at that time because other trains
Speaker 4: are counting on it so they can pass it safely
Speaker 4: and whatnot. So railroads very early standardized time, you know
Speaker 4: when nationwide and what eighteen eighty three, I think somewhere thereabouts.
Speaker 4: And with that, now railroads could coordinate their schedules more
Speaker 4: efficiently and then more safely.
Speaker 3: Frankly, yeah, no one wants to be on a platform
Speaker 3: being like, is it noon or two?
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 3: My horse got thirsty, so it's got to me eleven.
Speaker 3: You're like, what Sunday? November eighteenth, eighteen eighty three, all
Speaker 3: of the US railroads synchronized their clocks, and then way
Speaker 3: later in nineteen eighteen, standard time became an official law,
Speaker 3: but it wasn't until two thousand and five, with the
Speaker 3: advent of texting, when I'm on my way became standard
Speaker 3: language to mean I haven't yet left the house, so
Speaker 3: just order without me. Do you get as jazzed about
Speaker 3: subways as you do about locomotives.
Speaker 4: I do. I'm I'm particularly fond of the Washington Metro system,
Speaker 4: and they opened up the new Silver Line, you know,
Speaker 4: not quite all the way to Dallas, but I made
Speaker 4: a point. My wife and I traveled out there. We
Speaker 4: simply rode there to the end of the line and back,
Speaker 4: so I could say I've done that mileage. So I
Speaker 4: have ridden every mile of that subway system. I haven't
Speaker 4: done every other one. But some people do that. They
Speaker 4: just travel around the world traveling different subway systems. It's
Speaker 4: a good time for them.
Speaker 3: Now do you look out the window the whole time
Speaker 3: or do you just like read a book and kick back.
Speaker 4: I like to look out the window. I like, you know,
Speaker 4: you can't really do that when you're underground, but I
Speaker 4: love it when you're above ground because again, you get
Speaker 4: a different view on things, and especially fun there when
Speaker 4: you're running through the media and of I sixty six
Speaker 4: to kind of laugh at all the traffic that's stuck
Speaker 4: there going nowhere. Haha. I'm going by at thirty five
Speaker 4: miles an hour. Have a good time sucker.
Speaker 3: So it's a showden Fried thing. Yeah, a pharaohequnology showden
Speaker 3: Freud sure rolls off the tongue. Brook Bosone asked this question,
Speaker 3: which I also like to ask. Do you have a
Speaker 3: favorite movie that takes place on a train?
Speaker 4: Oh, that's a great question. I have a few favorites.
Speaker 4: Actually I could talk about. One is maybe the greatest
Speaker 4: train movie and one of the greatest movies of all time,
Speaker 4: and that's Buster Keaton in The General nineteen twenty six,
Speaker 4: one of the highlights of silent cinema, and he did
Speaker 4: some incredible stunts in that movie that Osha would not
Speaker 4: allow anybody to try today, but absolutely worth watching.
Speaker 3: Was there any trainspotting in trainspoting?
Speaker 4: Yeah? I think the trainspotting they were doing was a
Speaker 4: different sort than actual train spoting. There were tracks involved,
Speaker 4: but they were not railroad tracks. We'll leave it at that.
Speaker 3: Oh God, I never really got that fun.
Speaker 4: I like the Great Locomotive Chase with Fess Parker. It
Speaker 4: was a Walt Disney movie made nineteen fifty six, great
Speaker 4: Civil War adventure story but actually based on the same
Speaker 4: story as The General, but it's more kind of By
Speaker 4: the facts for the Great Locomotive Chase. I also love
Speaker 4: the first Gene Wilder Richard Pryor joint movie, Silver Streak
Speaker 4: from nineteen seventy six, which is like kind of a
Speaker 4: Hitchcocking story. Speaking of Hitchcock, north By Northwest has a
Speaker 4: great railroad scene in it too, on the twentieth century limited,
Speaker 4: So lots of great train movies out there.
Speaker 3: Oh, did you see the Murderer on the Orient Express recently?
Speaker 4: I did, yes, strictly to see the trains. I'm not
Speaker 4: particularly Nagatha Christie fan, but you know, gotta go see
Speaker 4: some trains in the movie. So not enough of them anymore.
Speaker 3: You're not a Johnny Depp fan. He looked busted in that.
Speaker 4: I gotta say that he did.
Speaker 3: I would feel bad saying this, but I don't. Elizabeth
Speaker 3: Bassett wants to know how did train stack up in
Speaker 3: terms of efficiency and cost against semi trucks.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's really no more efficient method of overland travel
Speaker 4: than the railroad, and you can't beat that. Downside, of course,
Speaker 4: is when it comes to delivering that freight, you've got
Speaker 4: to take things off the tree and loaded onto a
Speaker 4: semi truck for that last mile, so to speak, whereas
Speaker 4: with a semi truck you just leave it on the
Speaker 4: truck and take it right to the door. There's been
Speaker 4: a lot of intermodal transportation now in the last few
Speaker 4: decades where items will come safe from Asia and they'll
Speaker 4: travel by ship in these large forty foot containers, and
Speaker 4: then that container gets moved by a giant crane onto
Speaker 4: a flat car. It can move by rail to some
Speaker 4: point in the middle of the country, and then that
Speaker 4: container gets moved off the flat car put onto a
Speaker 4: semi trailer and then can be delivered. So you're not
Speaker 4: unpacking the objects, you're just moving the actual trailer, for
Speaker 4: lack of a better term, the container.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's kind of like a lego goes from this
Speaker 3: thing to that thing to that thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, very much like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which is pretty cool. It's like, oh, that's a
Speaker 3: good idea.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it's pretty pretty slick.
Speaker 3: And then when you're done, you can take the shipping
Speaker 3: container and make a coffee shop in Brooklyn out of it.
Speaker 4: There you can or yeah, a small house or something
Speaker 4: or someone.
Speaker 3: So I looked, and you can buy a four hundred
Speaker 3: square foot house made out of a shipping container on Amazon.
Speaker 3: It'll cost you thirty six thousand dollars and the reviews
Speaker 3: are very bad. Said it was over. Then I found
Speaker 3: one for fifteen grand on Etsy. But really, these shipping
Speaker 3: containers are like two thousand dollars used if you just
Speaker 3: want to pinterest it up and put a little elbow
Speaker 3: grease into some DIY living in a metal box. Also,
Speaker 3: this next question is what when I was a journalist
Speaker 3: at the La Times, I learned was called And I'm
Speaker 3: just gonna blete this because this is one of the
Speaker 3: very few non sweary episodes, because I work with the
Speaker 3: Henry Ford on a children's show. But this question is
Speaker 3: the whole question. It's the great question you save for
Speaker 3: the end of the interview, just in case it ficks
Speaker 3: up your rapport to all and they tell you to
Speaker 3: go to So Dan Goding asked the awkward and wonderful question,
Speaker 3: what was Henry Ford's role in trains in America? And
Speaker 3: is that over weird for you to be working at
Speaker 3: the Henry Ford when Ford was much more of an
Speaker 3: automotive proponent proponent than perhaps the locomotive.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Henry Ford is nothing if not a study in contrast.
Speaker 4: So this is another example. I think he would have
Speaker 4: counted himself a faroequinologist. He used to talk about when
Speaker 4: he grew up here in Dearborn, running down to the
Speaker 4: Michigan Central Track and waving at the engineer as he
Speaker 4: went by. A lot of the locomotives we have in
Speaker 4: our collection he personally collected. He built that replica Civil
Speaker 4: War era coach for the dedication of this museum because
Speaker 4: he thought he had to have a proper train here
Speaker 4: for the ceremony. He actually owned a railroad for a
Speaker 4: few years. He bought the Detroit, Toledo and Ironton, which
Speaker 4: is a local line here that runs from the Detroit
Speaker 4: area down to the Ohio River. He invested something like
Speaker 4: fifteen million dollars improving that railroad. He had all the
Speaker 4: engineers wear spotless white uniforms, maybe not the best color
Speaker 4: choice in retrospect.
Speaker 3: That's like wearing a white jumpsuit on Day twenty seven, dude,
Speaker 3: if you know what I mean.
Speaker 4: He had them polish up the locomotives with shiny brass
Speaker 4: so they looked their absolute best. So you know, he
Speaker 4: actually loved railroads, And you know, I don't think he
Speaker 4: set out to build the model T with the intentive
Speaker 4: killing railroads. He was probably surprised, like many other people had,
Speaker 4: how quickly the automobile caught on and how effectively it
Speaker 4: wiped out other competing transportation meta But you know, he
Speaker 4: traveled by a private railcar. He enjoyed trains right up
Speaker 4: through the end of his life.
Speaker 3: So there you go, the King of cars, Doug trains.
Speaker 3: What's the coolest train.
Speaker 4: In the World's that's a great question, the one that's
Speaker 4: operating in front of you right now, I would say,
Speaker 4: and I think a lot of faraohecronologists would agree with that.
Speaker 3: Whatever you see rumbleby is the coolest exactly right, yep.
Speaker 3: Is there any flim flam about trains you'd like to debunk?
Speaker 3: Any myths that you're like, come.
Speaker 4: On, people, Well that's the one that we already talked
Speaker 4: about about. What is a train versus a locomotive? I
Speaker 4: think is a pretty big one. So I'm glad we
Speaker 4: got that taken.
Speaker 3: Care of, right, And last two questions always what's the
Speaker 3: suckiest thing about your job? What's the hardest or most
Speaker 3: annoying thing about your job that you're like.
Speaker 4: Uh, well, you know, I have a lot of people
Speaker 4: who will walk up to me and say, wow, you
Speaker 4: must have a dream job, And I have to say
Speaker 4: it's enjoyable. This is not to cut on it, but
Speaker 4: you know, it's not as though I walk through the
Speaker 4: museum with a box of popcorn every day looking at
Speaker 4: the exhibits. I mean, it has its bad days too,
Speaker 4: And one of the challenges I think is the frustration
Speaker 4: and not being able to get to definitive answers to
Speaker 4: some things. You know, when a lot of these early pieces,
Speaker 4: not just the locomotives, but everything we have in the
Speaker 4: museum was collected in the late twenties early thirties, record
Speaker 4: keeping was not what we might have today, so you know,
Speaker 4: there are certain answers that will never be able to
Speaker 4: find here. So that can be frustrating. And you know,
Speaker 4: it can be difficult to try and tell all the
Speaker 4: stories that you want to tell because you just don't
Speaker 4: have the time to go into the detail. There's always
Speaker 4: some other pressing activity you have to take care of.
Speaker 4: So yeah, those are frustrations, but on the whole, it's
Speaker 4: a lot of fun.
Speaker 3: So a lack of omniscience, we'll just shock it up
Speaker 3: to not knowing everything in the known universe and space
Speaker 3: and time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, if I could know that, this job would be pie.
Speaker 3: You know. And what's your favorite thing about trains or
Speaker 3: your job?
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, this is well my fav I can answer
Speaker 4: about my My favorite thing about trains is I get
Speaker 4: to work with them in my job. My favorite thing
Speaker 4: about job is the trains. But now my favorite part
Speaker 4: of the job. What I really love here is that,
Speaker 4: you know, there are few jobs out there where you
Speaker 4: can get instant gratification. You know, when I'm up there
Speaker 4: in the office banging away at the computer, buried in books,
Speaker 4: I get kind of frustrated. I can walk out into
Speaker 4: the museum here and I can see people actually enjoying
Speaker 4: the work that we do, and you know, hopefully learning
Speaker 4: something while they're here too. So that's really rewarding. And
Speaker 4: I think the best part about the job and the
Speaker 4: best part about trains. You know, I mentioned the size,
Speaker 4: but I no one will ever beat the magic of
Speaker 4: a steam locomotive. You know, they are in a sense
Speaker 4: living creatures. You know, they hiss, they roar, they make noises,
Speaker 4: smells and sounds that you just don't find anywhere else.
Speaker 4: And we haven't used steam locomotives in any big capacity
Speaker 4: in this country for more than sixty years now, and
Speaker 4: yet people still know what they sound like, they still
Speaker 4: love them, and they still I think for a lot
Speaker 4: of people, are the first thing that comes into your
Speaker 4: head when you think train.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that who like absolutely lowing smoke? Yeah, of course?
Speaker 3: And where can people find you or do you have
Speaker 3: anything any train resources?
Speaker 4: Two point to yeah, they can find me right here
Speaker 4: at the Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan. They can come
Speaker 4: out and see some of our stationary locomotives in the museum,
Speaker 4: or they can ride behind a live steam locomotive through
Speaker 4: Greenfield Village on our.
Speaker 3: This has been amazing. Thank you so much for doing this.
Speaker 4: I learned so much my pleasure.
Speaker 3: So the next time you see a train, feel free
Speaker 3: to audibly say woo for so many reasons. And also
Speaker 3: please no selfies near trains. And they're not paying me
Speaker 3: to make this episode, but to see some of their
Speaker 3: historical artifacts, including trains. Check out the Henry Ford on Instagram.
Speaker 3: Innovation Nation is shot there and it's on CBS Saturday mornings,
Speaker 3: or you can find episodes online. I'm in every episode
Speaker 3: in case you want to have some Aliyward. Content that
Speaker 3: doesn't usually involve the F word. Ologies is at ologies
Speaker 3: on Instagram and Twitter and I'm Ali Ward with one L.
Speaker 3: There are more links up at aliward dot com slash ologies.
Speaker 3: There is merch at ologiesmerch dot com. Thank you Shannon
Speaker 3: Fultis and Bonny Dutch for being merch queens. A link
Speaker 3: to the campology September fifteenth event in Portland, it's just
Speaker 3: in the show notes. And thank you to Aaron Talbert
Speaker 3: and Hannah Lippo for being wonderful admins in the Facebook
Speaker 3: Ologies podcast group. I said last week that it's the
Speaker 3: only reason I really go on Facebook anymore, but I'd
Speaker 3: like to issue a correction and say this week photos
Speaker 3: of my brainiac and wonderful cousin Brooke Rennick getting married
Speaker 3: were a highlight. They were definitely a reason to scroll.
Speaker 3: Congratulations to you and Lauren. Congratulations to Stephen Ray Morris
Speaker 3: for being just cool as hell, and to Nick Thorburn
Speaker 3: for being very good at writing and performing theme songs
Speaker 3: such as ours, which is titled Ali at the Museum.
Speaker 3: If you stick around through their credits, you know I
Speaker 3: tell you secret and this one I feel like I'm
Speaker 3: gonna hear a lot of feedback on this one. But
Speaker 3: I'm gonna tell you I've never seen any of the
Speaker 3: Harry Potter movies ever, not even one minute of them,
Speaker 3: and I have never admitted that to anyone. And I
Speaker 3: feel like I should see them, and I want to,
Speaker 3: but I feel like I should watch them all in
Speaker 3: one night. And it depends on the mood or the occasion.
Speaker 3: Do I have snacks? Like should I do? I?
Speaker 5: Should?
Speaker 3: I never and see them. I read a little bit
Speaker 3: of one of the books and I got so hungry
Speaker 3: because they just kept talking about like triacle puddings and stuff,
Speaker 3: and I was like, God, damn it, I just need
Speaker 3: a snack. And so I've never watched the movies. But
Speaker 3: tell me how if I should watch the Harry Potter movies,
Speaker 3: And if so, how thank you? Okay, you're the best forbye. Hacadermatology,
Speaker 3: hombiology or doo zoology, lithology, Yeah, technology, meteorology, mattology, ethnology, zeriology, ethnology.
Speaker 4: It's a lot of fun.