Well There's Your Problem | Episode 15: The Advanced Passenger Train
Вставка
- Опубліковано 19 сер 2024
- In this video, @aliceavizandum, @oldmananders0n, @donoteat01 and guest @rilaah take a butcher's at the ill-fated Advanced Passenger John.
The referenced video:
• ADVANCED BR TRAIN - CO...
slide 1
By G-Man at English Wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons. Transfer was stated to be made by User:oxyman., Public Domain, commons.wikime...
slide 2
By Classical geographer - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, commons.wikime...
slide 3
coronation scott
By Agence de presse Meurisse - Bibliothèque nationale de France, Public Domain, commons.wikime...
flying scotsman
By Ben Brooksbank, CC BY-SA 2.0, commons.wikime...
slide 4
By Barry Lewis - Kenton Bypasser - 8, CC BY 2.0, commons.wikime...
slide 5
By Szilas - Own work, photo by Szilas, CC0, commons.wikime...
slide 7
By Lthomson1 - Photo by Lthompson1Transfered from English Wikipedia; en:Image:Metroliner1968.jpg, Public Domain, commons.wikime...
slide 8
By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, en.wikipedia.o...
slide 9
By Source, Fair use, en.wikipedia.o...
slide 10
old dalby
By Alan Murray-Rust, CC BY-SA 2.0, commons.wikime...
BR research
By British Rail Design Research Unit - SVG created from British Rail Corporate Identity Manual, sheet 2/28 - April 1974, Public Domain, commons.wikime...
slide 11
By Dave coxon at English Wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Oxyman using CommonsHelper., Public Domain, commons.wikime...
slide 12
By Barry Lewis - Rainhill - 22, CC BY 2.0, commons.wikime...
slide 13
picture
By mattbuck (category) - Own work by mattbuck., CC BY-SA 3.0, commons.wikime...
BREL
By British Rail Design Research Unit - SVG created from British Rail Corporate Identity Manual, sheet 2/33 - January 1980, Public Domain, commons.wikime...
slide 14
By Train Photos - 43Stafford, CC BY-SA 2.0, commons.wikime...
slide 15
By Phil Sangwell - 370003 Carlisle, CC BY 2.0, commons.wikime...
slide 16
www.curbsidecl...
slide 17
By Steven Duhig from Bowie, Maryland, USA - Carlisle Prototype APTUploaded by oxyman, CC BY-SA 2.0, commons.wikime...
slide 18
By Roger Puta - VIA 6917 at Newtonville, ON on October 5, 1987, Public Domain, commons.wikime...
slide 19
By Ben Brooksbank, CC BY-SA 2.0, commons.wikime...
slide 20
CC BY-SA 3.0, commons.wikime...
The she/her dude is so annoying. I wish she would just shut up and stop rudely interjecting every sentence.
So, like, why are you here?
@@calebjiang4056 I'm here for the leftist perspectives on engineering disasters, trans solidarity, and tasteless jokes. I also think it's a nice podcast to knit to.
And a word of advice: Don't refer to Alice as "the she/her guy". Alice is a woman. :)
@@scarylion1roar Dude is a unisex term to refer to someone you forgot/don't know the name of. There are tons of leftist podcasts, but few about engineering disasters. My point still stands that the constant interjections and dumb stereotypes is really annoying and detracts from the stories being told while needlessly driving up the runtime. I'm all for trans rights and whatnot, but it's distracting in this context and unnecessary after saying it dozens of times throughout the series.
@@calebjiang4056 I'm sure they'll change their podcast's established style and friendship dynamics 15 episodes in just for you. :)
@@scarylion1roar I'm not delusional enough to think they will, but I think giving them feedback is better than not, especially since they talk about reading angry comments so I know they go through the comments section.
Two and a half minutes of perfectly serviceable Fake Taxi jokes, only to have Justin steal the whole bit with the perfect Bang Bus joke.
Hermes Bouza 2020, year of the horny.
@@hairman943 and alone good luck going outside now.
If you wanted to do a comedy routine, you want to save the best line for last.
Fuckin nailed it, like a railroad spike
The bang bus loop in was epic
2:38
“I don’t think [Fake Taxi is] a real transportation system that we should rely on; I prefer the Bang-Bus.”
-Justin Roczniak for President 2020
"Running a train good, fake taxi bad"
-Alice Caldwell-Kelly
Do I still need to listen to the driver vent their problems if they fuck me?
it's funny how Japan made high-speed rail by making electric trains go in straight lines and everywhere else in the world was like "let's do some complicated bullshit"
The French, Spanish and Chinese did the exact same thing and the Germans basically as well
@@MrJimheeren yeah true
@@MrJimheerenat least the japanese are on time.
The shinkansen now uses active tilting as well
Can personally attest: the shinkansen is fucking wonderful and the fact the rest of the world hasn’t followed suit as a matter of “this is a solved problem and an adequate solution” baffles me.
"Operating on a shoestring budget in a slapstick country" is possibly the best description of any project I have ever heard.
"My pronouns are 23 and skidoo."
"Joe Biden?"
One of the best jokes this podcast has produced.
I still don't understand this joke
@@xmlthegreat 23 Skidoo is an antiquated slang, and Biden is known for such.
bruh this tilt mechanism full of B E A N S
Opens tilt mechanism: this is beans inside
1:23:35
You know you're in for a good podcast about engineering when it starts with a discussion about the correct naming convetions for british pornography.
The way Justin pronounces "shinkansen" *exactly* like one would pronounce "Wisconsin" has me fucking dying. This is what I subscribed for.
I'm a Japanese American and I'm from the American Midwest.
Hearing "Shinconsin" broke me for a good 5 minutes.
Shinconsin
"Glazgoww"
@@Tomartyr Glæzgó
We need a fusion of Justin and T-Pain who can rhyme Shinkansen with Wisconsin with Mansion
The best middle finger to the Tories by rail enthusiasts would be to restore an APT to full operation. I actually gave a speech to class on the APT at secondary school.
What a delightful comment. Nice one Thomas.
PS. Anyone can borrow my middle finger for use in displaying to Tories.
Have you tried tilting the tracks?
@@dongiovanni4331 ?
@@thomasgray4188 the process of developing the train could have been vastly simplified by banking the tracks.
@@dongiovanni4331 I know I watched the video
The slogan of our water company, Affinity Water, is "Your local supply, on tap". I wonder how much they paid a marketing consultant for that one. We also received a letter recently which said on the envelope "NHS - Providing NHS services."
The best one I ever had:
“Kingston Council Parking Services: Combining parking with service"
"NHS services" cause me pain on the same level as "ATM machine".
@@kabobawsome or "PIN Number"
ua-cam.com/video/8H_BozF4EZE/v-deo.html
I recall when Alice said that TGV stands for Train Gbaguette Vracisme. Maybe SNCF stands for Societe Nationale des Cartoonsislamophobiques et Fromage
Which episode was this?
@@siddharthm285 It was on a Twitch stream Alice did, I think!
Bravo. *chef's kiss*
Oh my god! I digitized and uploaded the 'British Rail Research' and 'British Rail Engineering Limited' logos to Wikipedia.
That's so cool... I helped.
you're not the hero we deserved, but the hero we needed… or something
My dad's an engineer, and Scottish, and he left the UK and went to America exactly because of the class mentality you guys are talking about. He said British innovation and industry were slowly being strangled because nobody could get anywhere in their career, and be taken seriously, unless they, as he puts it, "wore the old school tie."
I just don't know if this episode really captures the magic of the tacoma narrows episode.
Let's just celebrate that we all got to experience the Tacoma Narrows episode.
nothing came close to the tacoma narrows episode tbh
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster episode was peak WTYP, I shall not look upon its like again.
I loved simulacrum taxi on the dreamcast, the later re-releases just aren't the same without the original licenced soundtrack
Fake Taxi was a minigame that was sadly cut from Shenmue II
I love Alice. I love her SO MUCH. I, too, am sad and emotional about the dumb train. ;__;
A specter is haunting this podcast - the specter of "Activate Windows."
1:26:51 personal timestamp for where my favourite part of this episode begins. Alice's absolutely stellar rant on Britain, and hauntology. Perfect.
leaving a comment on this so I can find it again. I keep coming back to this episode every once in a while and it still makes me tear up a little bit
That old BR ad with a Police-liveried loco chasing an HST set for speeding: the Police loco was a Class 37; also a Co-Co English Electric loco but not a Deltic. (The last of the Deltics were withdrawn in '82; RIP the ones that didn't make it into preservation, by all Fates we loved you). As an effort by my own home country it also had the mandatory inbuilt fail: the white paint applied to the 37 was meant to be wash-off-able once the filming was completed... but when the jetwash was applied, it refused to budge. Cue a works visit for an impromptu full repaint before returning to service. You couldn't make it up.
F in chat for DP2 - the prototype next-gen high power diesel built in a surplus Deltic bodyshell, and precursor to the semi-tragic Class 50. Written off when it ran into derailed concrete wagons at about 80mph
I would want to correct this myth:
FIAT Ferroviaria already had designed and built tilting trains before the APT program was canceled.
The first Pendolino was the ETR 401 which was put in service in 1976. The Italian system was successful because it was based on gyroscopes and not just accelerometers, also they had run tests on a single car electric loco before (FIAT Y 0160).
"Alright, let's roll the clip... that you're going to have to roll yourself manually."
I love this podcast so much. 😂
So, fun little addition to the APT-E experimental units: The thing was designed to be a multiple unit, and the "2-end" car (appropriately, number IIRC TC-2) had a bird-strike that irreparably destroyed the windshield wiper. Irrepairable, because it was a test train, and they were building the "proper ones" soon anyway.
It's now preserved, complete with the wipers at one end missing, in the NRM collection.
Fun useless fact.
Fs in chat for the bird
@@nohway844 F
gotta defrost the chicken first
F
No comrades, soviet answer was to soup up a TEP70, call it a TEP80 and run that 180 TON diesel locomotive with aerodynamics of a brick at Two Hundred And Seventy kilometers an hour on a speed test run, thus achieving the unofficial diesel speed record. You can watch that insanity on youtube as it was filmed.
What I mean to say is TEP70 STRONK
"...to Canada!"
@@centralshaft801 no, we wouldn't accept it. Also, if we cared enough, we could've just slapped some big turbos on an LRC.
20:28 "They [the French] didn't want to do the German route of, like, having the extremely fast train just powered by, essentially, a guy showing coal into the back of it, but with more steps."
I laughed at this more than I should have
Well, in Germany we don´t wan´t that fancy shit people call renewable energy. I mean whats the point ? Apart from saving the world obviously...
Germany gave up on caring for the world when they were told they couldn’t have it. Understandable really.
It hurts, if only because it is as funny as it is true.
We buy a bunch of electricity from the czechs and belgians, and those guys are on top of their spicy rocks game, especially with the cracking reactor vessels (Belgium) and the RMBK reactor designs (Czechia). But yeah, despite the filters and the de-Sulphurication, coal fired plants aren't great for anybody, except the owners.
@@dakunssd
The micro-cracks from the Belgian reactors were not found to be structurally compromising nor a problem with reactor vessel lifetime and could, in any case, be resolved by hot annealing of the vessel if they so choose. These are micro-cracks in the context of a steel vessl that is over a meter thick in most places, and the structure is also designed to arrest crack propagation. Both the operator and the nuclear safety agency found that there was no aspect of the micro-cracking that would pose a threat to public safety, unlike the Hambach forest and villages that were bulldozed for coal, and Germany starting to build more coal power plants again, the pollution of which kills thousands of Europeans a year.
It's a little rich for the Germans, whose policies have largely informed those of the EU troika, to not only insist on austerity for every other EU member while it runs an export led economy; thus immiserating the poor and spiralling inequality upwards, but also deign itself to be in a position to inform the policy of other countries. It is a little rich for the Germans to also insist, despite _national_ regulators exercising their expert opinion, that Tihange and Doel pose an existential threat, and say that they must be shut down. It is also the height of hypocrisy, to have woke neoliberal energy policy that has caused 400,000 households to be cut off from electricity in Germany since the feed-in tariffs were implemented; while farm owners get overcompensated for putting solar panels on arable land and factory owners get complete immunity from spiralling electricity costs.
Energiewende should be renamed Braunkohlewende mit windmuhlen for fig leaf greenwashing.
The many layers of Fake Taxi. Beautiful
I'm not a British rail expert, but I think "give us the dumbest and fastest thing you have" is basically British rail history summed up.
Alice is a treasure and a gift, she makes me proud to also be an Alice
I can understand Alice's dislike for Private Eye cover jokes (they're an acquired taste) but the sausage roll joke works perfectly! The setup implies the roll was shaken off the table, and the response adds to it by saying the vibrations caused the sausage roll to break the train's tilt mechanism. It's covering two bases in the same joke, it's good.
I'm sorry for doing this on a 2 years old comment but this irked me so much, even when they missed the joke in the episode! It's such a nice double-entendre between "Have you seen my sausage roll (the pastry)" and "have you seen my sausage roll (off the table)". The reader understands the former first and the waiter responds to the latter meaning, saying that the sausage did indeed roll due to the tilt mechanism. damn why did nobody get this :(
German living in the UK here and this analysis of UK culture - bless em - is just what I needed.
Thanks so much for explaining why we conventionally list two pronouns. I've been wondering about that for some time.
*I opened a Steam window while watching this video, and Train Simulator was the featured game.*
The only comparable thing I can think of in Germany is the Berlin Airport. Which I think would be hilarious.
The planned building time of 6 years is now at 14 years, and who knows how much longer it still will take.
I love Alice’s idea of strike inflatables. Do you work in an industry where they can try to sneak new workers in as scabs, without the new workers knowing that they’re scabs? That becomes a lot harder when you set up a huge brightly-colored wavy tube man in front of the work site, and it shows up in a filler section on the local news
Scabby the Rat is real
@@venus_de_lmao Omg, I had no idea until now when I looked it up. This is incredible
I've lobbied at every job I've had to use the early middle english "ou" but nobody bites. From about the same time period, "a" was also a personal pronoun, and I think that's charmingly old timey: "a took a walk to a's drainage field for t'see the silts." So far as I know a/ou don't have a distinct objective version but we could sub in the Victorian "thon" for a real good old time.
24:56 I'm laughing at the idea of a 45' tall "Research" on a hill like the "HOLLYWOOD" sign
I always thought the APTE's cab looked like a robot-goose but now I can't unsee the welding-mask tacked onto the front.
Podcast actually starts at 6:25
edit: No, wait. 7:10
edit: Nope, sorry. 9:20 They'll definitely start this time.
A bit like the UK rail service boom boom...
Yeah the ratio of bullshit to podcast in this one is high :(
The bullshit is the good stuff tho.
@@FlakeSE it's why we watch/listen.
You're not wrong about York but I feel obligated to defend our tiny fake city to the death.
Isn't this how a major medieval war started?
YOU'RE FROM YORK DO YOU KNOW MATT GRAY
@@nerdorama009 in the 1400’s York was the second largest city in Britain. It just isn’t that much bigger today than it was then.
FWIW, Wikipedia says you have a population of 140,000. Where I'm from "the big city" has about 50,000. 140,000 is almost unfathomably huge for most of us in my neck of the woods.
I am now going to be reccomended trains videos.
Thank you so much!
Find some IC-125 Paxman Valenta videos
23:00 I'm Leeaaavin on a Jet Train, don't know when I'll be back again
Mostly due to whether it will still be operational for the return trip.
Wait, does this mean that train... bad?! My brain cannot handle this contradiction.
This is where the dialectic comes in handy
Train good
Train that looks like Star Tours bad
No, train good. That was actually the reason it got such terrible reviews. The tilt was actually too good, and thus triggered the motion sickness response in most of the people on-board. As I'm sure they mention later in the podcast, this ended up being sold to Fiat, who turned it into the Pendelino, which was most definitely a success.
The Chapo subreddit loves this pod lol
F
you guys should look into the V-250 'Fyra' alias: Neo-liberal Dutch and Italians try to make a high-speed railway on the cheap with the trusted aid of THE FREE MARKET™
Now it's working in Italy :D
What can POSSIBLY go wrong with that?
Oh God I remember that disaster. Now the same Italian company will do the maintenance on the JSF. It's gonna be great
@@Choosinganameisharddontjudge The rail division was purchased by Hitachi. Hopefully Hitachi has improved the corporate governance a bit.
An increasingly good podcast - unlike civil engineering under late capitalism. (Yeah I cribbed my own tweet what of it.)
You cribbed you own tweet? FFFFUUUUCCCKKKK YYYYOOOOUUUU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ass whole
Oooh another cool rail disaster would be the entire Australian rail network. Somehow we fucked ourselves so hard that we have more Irish broad gauge track than Ireland, more Cape gauge track than the Cape of Africa, a standard gauge transcontinental main line, two entire states without any regional passenger rail, and a 1000km long network of industrial sugar cane railways. We're also tearing a lot of it up. It's hot.
I was in Euston Station last week, can confirm, it's a hellmouth from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, only real and with trains.
Best time to go there is about 10pm, to get on the Caledonian Sleeper and escape to Scotland in a haze of whisky.
The UK concept of "public school" sounds like a misnomer
Like most British things, it made a kind of sense once, but no longer.
The simpler explanation is "a non-selective non-state funded school"
back when everyone was educated only by their own tutors and governesses it is the public school, the others were church schools
UK schooling is very complicated. It's been suffering at times 'perpetual reform,' like our health service. Expensive reforms are put in place, then the government changes, the new powers that be promptly start implementing their own visions for the future, and a few years later the cycle repeats.
The current government is continuing their long-standing policy of converting every school they can do academies, which are similar to what the US would call charter schools. The reasons for this are purely ideological: The Conservative party is a sort of Republican-lite. They believe in the efficiency of the private sector, so their general policy is to shut down any government service that can instead be contracted out. Including education.
My pronouns are they/them and I love choo-choos 🚂 🚊 🚞 💕
I love and support you
Southerner here! All soda is Coke, yes. All sparkling water, not coke, but LaCroix.
Lots of brand loyalty for a part of the country that predominantly drinks DrPepper
what if we kissed..... in the tilt mechanism
Brilliant!
Ever going to do that engineered lumber episode you mentioned in the Groverhaus bonus ep? That'd be pretty interesting. Maybe expand it to the other building materials you've joked about, like high-strength steel.
You have mentioned the B-36. You must do an episode now, because it's...
2 turning
2 burning
2 smoking
2 choking
And 2 unaccounted for!
I think I must comment on how now I have a musical bug in my head for the companion video you linked to and I feel I must make Justin directly responsible for this. I will let it slide however, since he's still probably watching this from Twitter Gulag for his heroic act of rebellion.
If you still need to know the song for any reason, it is James Clarke - Inter City 2 from the KPM music library
24:17 - it's not even a coach train, it's a modified electric commuter train from the 1950s, ubiquitous across anywhere in the USSR there was electrified rail.
you know, this made me realize that the idea of hauntology could only be expanded upon (like it was by mark fisher) in britain
I used to think the random slapstick disasters that happened on Thomas the Tank Engine were too farfetched and stupid to be anything except ridiculous, but listening to this I am convinced there were far stupider things
Oh no, most of the classic series episodes, including that one where Gordon bursts through a station wall, were based on real events.
I'm looking forward to Well There's Your Problem and Trashfuture combining into Well Your Future's Trash
I'm so glad someone knew "six turnin' four burnin,' it's like the "rollin' coal" of American strategic nuclear force.
The B-36 was such a disaster because it was a very 1938 approach to building the Biggest, Most Awesome Bomber Ever, that happened to be ready just in the nick of 1949, and it had ignored absolutely everything that had been learned over the course of the intervening decade
I grew up in southeastern PA, not far from Philly. I'm currently in Japan for work, so hearing "shinkansen" pronounced in the most Philly way possible warms my heart.
It it awful and wonderful all ah once
With regards to the streamlined steam engines; both coronation and A4 classes featured superheated, and used superheated steam for better efficiency
28:34 was the point where I realized Justin wasn’t talking about the AMC pacer
As someone who worked for the Portuguese rail company (in IT, though), sorry, I prefer the Pendulino, which they still manage to have over 90% availability for. Happy to learn it's origins, though, thanks BR, may you return to glory.
Hi. Just got to listen to this episode. Excellent commentary and as someone who grew up during the era I got to hear a lot of new info about the whole sorry episode. Two points you didn't make: one is that that the WCML is incredibly bendy and uppy and downy - so simple brute force (ie HST 125 and 225) couldn't get the desired speed increases - you needed a tilting train, which is why the Pendolino worked ( it smells a bit but we love it). The other is (I am given to believe) that modern electric trains are so good at accelerating and relatively light (so faster up inclines), that they compensate for the relative slowness round corners. Hence they are not bothering with tilting classic compatible trains for HS2.
Great podcast and I'm looking forward to the HS2 edition!
Resident southerner from Georgia, have heard the stereotype that southerners call all things Coke and have never actually seen it happen in any of the southern states I’ve visited. Normal ordering goes:
“I’ll have a coke to drink”
“Is Pepsi okay?”
“Absolute not, mtn dew it is”
i had a ride on the LRC trains back in the 80's between Montreal and Quebec city and it was fabulous. The only way to know we were in a curve was to look outside. When seated it was very comfortable but it was another thing when standing.
Checking in from Texas - Sparkling Water is not Coke.
My pronouns are Pop and Soda.
It's great for us in italy though, we sold them a worse version of their own train, and then when we moved on from the pendolinos the brits bought our used shit for parts! 🤣
I mean, was it really worse? They were pretty good trains, and don't forget that one fell off a cliff at Greyrigg with only a single fatality and none of the windows even broke. Doubt the BR version would've done that. :/
@@TwoWholeWorms well, there's not enough data - thankfully - to be authoritative about crash safety on the BR train, or the pendolino for that matter, but aside from the crash cell all the passenger-facing materials on the pendolinos were pretty crappy, very early 90s fiat interior.
Mind, BR mighta/woulda/shoulda probably done the same level of cost-cutting if they'd ever spun up to real scale production.
But that doesn't make it nearly as funny! 🤣
Greetings from Texas!
We Southerners (or at least Texans, some folks do it differently in the Deep South, Alabama-Georgia way) mostly use Coke as a generic term for any soda until offered the choice of a specific brand or flavor, at which point we will revert to requesting that specific flavor.
Example: "Hey, could you grab me a coke?" "Sure, you want Pepsi, Sprite, or Dr. Pepper?" "Oh, Dr. Pepper'd be great, thanks."
And no, we don't refer to sparkling water as coke; that's either sparkling water or bubbly in parts further east.
Moot point anyway as they're all inferior to sweet (ice) tea... except from Whataburger, their sweet tea is nasty, just get me a coke.
1:28:00 mid engined train? Meet the Stadler FLIRT, at least the diesel or hyrdgen versions, which have a power pack thing in the middle (but powered bogies under driving cars)
Not to mention the Stadler GTW that features the middle power unit in every incarnation, even electric ones. They seem to be quite fond of that design.
Actually only the GTW uses the mid-engined design in any option. The FLIRT hides the engines below the floor on most versions.
Yes but you can go through the train.
These are called the Class 755 in operation in Britain on the Rural East Anglia lines.
Sure many Brit fans of hauntology have seen BBC Tomorrows World's review of the 70s... the greatest disasters highlighted were;
the Tyne Metro (which got built and subsequently expanded into the Tyne and Wear metro) where the main crime seems to have been trying to build a new rail based transit system that wasn't in London and
The AGR nuclear power stations - which I'm sure must have cost thousands of times more than APTs.
AGRs were intended to be a third way civil power reactor standing apart from capitalist PWR's (3 mile island) and communist RBMK (chernobyl) designs... and they were supposed to recoup their development costs with huge export sales (never realised)
AGR programme suffered from the familiar British management and the traditional British over-complexity in pursuit of design objectives that weren't worth it - AGRs were supposed to allow on-load refuelling so you hardly ever had to shut down your reactor (after they were completed no one ever did this with an AGR afaik) and produce steam at a higher temperature than PWRs so you could use the same turbine as a coal burning station rather than going to the slight additional cost of designing a new turbine (and reap a small benefit in thermodynamic efficiency)
To be fair, AGR could probably have worked a lot better if it had used nitrogen or helium as a coolant as opposed to CO2. As it is, the (very expensive) refits and maintenance to make CO2 work have resolved most of the issues surrounding carbon dendrite growth and graphite cracking. But having settled on CO2 it is pretty difficult to go back.
Export sales were killed off by NPT and by strategic concerns around dual use technology. The French built and ran an AGR and it performed quite well before being decommissioned due to the adoption of Westinghouse PWR technology imported from the Americans.
From an operational perspective, the AGR could have potentially had higher uptimes than the batch refuelling PWRs, but were stymied by the aforementioned British management. Given how developed PWRs are now it is easy to say that it was the "superior" path, but the Brits never pumped so much money and resources into refining their design iteratively, along with mass dissemination of the technology to promote a large supplier base.
As with anything nuclear, if you decide something, you need to commit to it full bore and have strong co-ordination between all levels of government, labour, and the design workforces. It's difficult to imagine such a level of co-ordination these days, but it was not so long ago that the British Empire had fought a World War across multiple theatres. State planning is a very perishable skill. It only takes a few years (like say the Thatcher years) to destroy decades of institution building.
Listening to this whole saga thinking "but the Shinkansen already existed! JUST DO THAT! Copy the thing you're trying to copy!"
I once went from Manchester to London on the West Coast Main Line and because some cows got on the lines it was 2 hours late. This was the high speed line.
This is the story of the British art of the bodge.
So true...
The beer can as part of the pronoun reminds me of the Fry & Laurie sketch about Derek Nippl-e (it's spelled "n, i, p, p, l, hyphen, e, but it's pronounced (drops a piece of wood)), of 22 (tap dance), Kings Lynn.
😆 loved that skit...
In my home town we have huge grassy medians in between streets that all lead to these beautiful early 1900s buildings. I learned that these used to be tracks for a trolley and elegant stations. It was all shut down and buried when the automobile was gonna be the future and if your city had trolleys that meant you were poor. The hauntology is real.
I knew a lot of the history behind the APT but I had never heard the bit about the unions going on strike because of it - that is so typical of Britain in the 1970s 😒
Just one little correction, if you're looking for a tank engine in Wales then it's Ivor the Engine, not Thomas 🚂!
The most embarrassing part about the Northeast Corridor is that a network of Chinatown buses can get you from Boston to DC in about the same amount of time for $24 and you don't have to stop in stupid Springfield.
god, i wish it was that cheap to get from chicago to nyc through any method
i dig that it's about double the distance of boston to dc, but it seems to cost almost 4 times as much despite buses cramming passenger stops in as many cities as possible in ohio and pennsylvania on the way there
1h43m? You serious? This is seriously stretching my lunch break, guys.
2x speed 4 lyfe, brother.
Any union should advocate for watching the whole dang thing
god I so much want to join you on one of these
though this is definitely my specialist subject and I am gutted not to have nerded out with you over the APT
(which is beautiful)
watching the budd metroliner cab car come at you at 110 mph is just as funny as you would think
I didn't understand "jawn" until someone explained it to me in terms of the smurfs. If you ever hear how they use Smurf, that's pretty much how people can use jawn EXCEPT Smurf can also be a verb and jawn cannot.
We need a WTYP for the Northeast Corridor
It would devolve into shouting at various Republican administrations for repeatedly pulling funding from the Portal Bridge and Tunnel replacements leaving Amtrak with a massive bottleneck held together by shoe strings and bubble gum.
@@centurion1945 don't forget the gap in Boston between South Station and North Station, where you need to get off and take two other trains/buses in order to get onto the other segment?
"Oh boy, a new WTYP!"
*Sees that it's **1:47:00** long*
"Welp, time to dig in boys."
"This train hit 164 miles an hour once"
It's still going
TUNE IN NEXT WEEK TO FIND OUT IF THEY'LL EVER ACTIVATE WINDOWS!
I interpreted the Fake Taxi thing as the guy is pretending to be running a legitimate business
37:00 front windscreen to withstand kids throwing rocks at the train @150mph ... but still probably not the frozen chicken canon.
Oh shit, I think I've been on that train through Switzerland. One of the epic things about trains is that sometimes they go through places that you can't really get to easily otherwise. I enjoyed all the travel on trains that I did around Europe back in 1996.
One time, I had a white lab coat because, well, I had to go to lab that day but I had yoga class first. My yoga teacher asked me if I had a coat and I showed her my lab coat. She worried that it wouldn't be enough but I told her that the lab coat is supposed to protect one from chemicals and that the water falling from the sky as rain was a chemical. It was funny because a lot of new age folk talk about chemicals as if all of them are bad but, in reality, everything we know is a chemicals. I do agree that bad chemicals stuck but chemicals, in and of themselves, are necessary for everything we have ever known as being real. Now whether stuff is real is another question but I posit that it's a meaningless question so long as we are all subject to the rules of existence.
36:53 i'm a train mechanic in France and I can assure you that sometimes we find weard shit on the roof of the train that some kid have thrown. Like an umbrella or part of a chair.
I think you missed the obvious one there
The sausage *rolls* because of the tilt mechanism tilting the train, making the sausage roll off the plate.
A new episode?? About trains??? What a marvelous surprise!
I had to look up 'polycule' and of course google list several elated words I had to read about, like 'unicorn', 'unicorn baby', 'v relationship', 'kitchen table polymory','metamour', 'sunshine baby', 'rainbow baby', and 'butterfly baby'. The last three don't have anything exclusive to polymory.
Switzerland did have a nuclear reactor meltdown. It would be just as long as the Tacoma narrows episode.
The Black Beetle looks like something out of Fallout. Amazing. I want it to be in a game so badly.
A genuine Riley vocal impersonation at the beginning, not a bad cockney there Riley!
The "last run" thing was LNER, a publicly owned company. There's full length ones still running on the Midland Mainline with EMT, and shortened ones with doors you don't have to open the window and reach out of to open operating with GWR in the far south west, Cross Country and Scotrail. You can literally go to Queen Street and see them Alice.
but that's outside
I didn't really follow the whole Fake Taxi convo until I realized they were NOT talking about the British version of Cash Cab.
Thank you for the awesome podcast!
I have been reading about the Ottawa LRT situation wishing you folks would cover it, but it's probably too early.