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Speaker 1: the I don't know stories of things we simply don't
Speaker 1: know the answer to get there. And welcome again to
Speaker 1: another episode of Thinking Sideways. I am Steve, as always
Speaker 1: joined by Devon Joe, and as usual we've got another
Speaker 1: mystery for you. This week we're gonna be talking about
Speaker 1: the Morgate tube crash, which was suggested to us by Richard.
Speaker 1: Thanks Richard, yes, so thank you, Richard. I gotta be
Speaker 1: honest with you when you first put up, you know,
Speaker 1: on our little spreadsheet that you were going to do
Speaker 1: this with like, boy, that's a dumb, super boring dumb.
Speaker 1: Actually turns out super interesting, way more interesting than originally anticipating.
Speaker 1: So good job, good job. More controversial too than you
Speaker 1: would think. Absolutely so. For folks who don't know, let's
Speaker 1: give a little bit of a primer here, as we
Speaker 1: always like to do. The In nineteen seventy five the
Speaker 1: Morgate Tube grash happened, which was the crash of a
Speaker 1: passenger train in the London underground and that was not
Speaker 1: having it for a landing pilot lost control, not that
Speaker 1: at all like that. No, it's a train, not a plane. Wrong, wrong,
Speaker 1: wrong aim. For those of you not familiar with the
Speaker 1: London Underground a k a. The Tube. It's London's rapid
Speaker 1: transit system and their rapid transit train system, which is
Speaker 1: both above and blowground. It's commuter light rail correct, much
Speaker 1: like the New York subways. The subway. People are familiar
Speaker 1: with the subway in America, we probably don't need to
Speaker 1: spell it out in two graphic. Although the Tube is
Speaker 1: much older. It's started in it's almost as old as
Speaker 1: Boston system. I'm kidding. And I was like, wait a second,
Speaker 1: because you know, London started in nineteen o four, although
Speaker 1: or not London but New York. Although I remember it
Speaker 1: was weird at first the London train or the New
Speaker 1: York train wasn't actually underground, it was just below grade. Partially.
Speaker 1: It was the weirdest train system in the world. But
Speaker 1: that's a completely different conversation. Actually, New York has got
Speaker 1: like this, this phantom subway tunnel. This guy actually got
Speaker 1: a train and everything that's been sealed off for years. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I heard about that to do an episode on it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this sounds familiar. Yeah, it's not bringing a bell at
Speaker 1: the moment. Yeah. So the accident that we're talking about
Speaker 1: in it takes place on the Highbury branch, which from
Speaker 1: what I can tell from the maps of the time,
Speaker 1: was a short north south line that ran between two
Speaker 1: larger lines, and it actually connects like three or maybe
Speaker 1: four lines. Well, it has stations, so that's what you need.
Speaker 1: That's the thing about the tube is when you read
Speaker 1: that map. I looked at it realized there's five stops,
Speaker 1: but two of those stops are on different partitions portions
Speaker 1: of the same line, and then one's on the north.
Speaker 1: But long story short, it was considered to be part
Speaker 1: of the North Line. It's no longer in service. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was. I'm not surprised that it's not in service
Speaker 1: because it was for passenger trains for the two because
Speaker 1: it was such a teeny tiny little line. Well, it's
Speaker 1: not very efficient if you connect. If you get those
Speaker 1: lines more directly, that means to train rides instead of
Speaker 1: three train rides for a lot of people. I can
Speaker 1: see where a lot of people would favor that. I
Speaker 1: totally have the same thought. I saw where the benefit
Speaker 1: for the commuter was, but not for the operator of
Speaker 1: the rail line. Just for history sake, I looked it up.
Speaker 1: The Boston area was eighteen thirty ishes when their railroad,
Speaker 1: their underground railroad started right, yeah? Uh? Is that the
Speaker 1: one for slaves or the one for just commuters? Sorry? Okay,
Speaker 1: to begin at the beginning of the story. On the
Speaker 1: day that things happened, the morning of February, the train
Speaker 1: left from Drayton Park, which was the northernmost stop on
Speaker 1: that line, and it left that stop to make its
Speaker 1: third loop of the day that particular train set and
Speaker 1: it left supposedly thirty seconds late. I see it always
Speaker 1: listed as having left at either eight thirty eight or
Speaker 1: eight thirty nine am. I'm not positive which, but I'm
Speaker 1: not going to split the thirty seconds to to worry
Speaker 1: about it. At eight forty six, the train was approaching
Speaker 1: its final destination, which was Morgate, which was the final
Speaker 1: stops super stubby Yeah, and it includes stops yeah stops
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, got it? Okay, yeah, super stubby line. So
Speaker 1: it's approaching its final destination, and the train should have
Speaker 1: been reducing its speed to come into the station, to
Speaker 1: come into that stop. At at most it should have
Speaker 1: been traveling at fifteen miles per hour it translates to
Speaker 1: four kilometers per hour, but instead it was going and
Speaker 1: estimated thirty to forty miles per hour, which translates to
Speaker 1: forty eight to sixty four kilometers an hour, so it
Speaker 1: was full more than double. It's a it's maximum allowable speed.
Speaker 1: I wonder what people on the platform we're doing. I mean,
Speaker 1: I know that I'd be running for the exit, but
Speaker 1: I wonder if people just stood there. And it sounds
Speaker 1: like a bunch of people stood there and watched it
Speaker 1: because it happened so fast, just happened too quickly to
Speaker 1: have much time to react. And so what happens is
Speaker 1: that the stop the tunnel for the train doesn't end
Speaker 1: at the end of the platform. It continued on another
Speaker 1: sixty six feet, which is twenty so there's twenty more
Speaker 1: of tunnel. And that tunnel had things in it that
Speaker 1: were meant to stop a runaway train. Well, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: it wasn't meant for something this fast. But it had
Speaker 1: what's called the sand drag, and then it also had
Speaker 1: a hydraulic buffer. So sand drag literally is just sand
Speaker 1: piled on the rails, in this instance two feet deep,
Speaker 1: and then the ram. It's basically you've seen this at
Speaker 1: the end of on TV, probably the end of the line.
Speaker 1: There's a block or a metal frame with a ram
Speaker 1: or hydraulic arm that is meant to absorb the speed
Speaker 1: of the train horizontally to stop it without making a
Speaker 1: major crash. Well, two problems, as we already identified. First off,
Speaker 1: the train is going way too fast and it blew
Speaker 1: through the drag. And the second problem was that the
Speaker 1: hydrafl buffer wasn't working. It was actually broken, So the
Speaker 1: only thing that probably helped slow the train down was
Speaker 1: colliding with the thing and ripping it out of the ground. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they probably should have stepped with the other kind of
Speaker 1: hydraulic popper, which is just all those fifty five yell
Speaker 1: and dromes filled with water, like having the freeways here
Speaker 1: in the States, right, Yeah, that can't break down too easy. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: oh no, it so so it was bad. I mean really,
Speaker 1: it tore through there, and obviously it hit the end
Speaker 1: of the tunnel because the tunnel did end after that
Speaker 1: hydraulic ram. To make things worse though, is that if
Speaker 1: you think about the tube, it's in a tunnel, and
Speaker 1: that tunnel is designed to only be a little bit
Speaker 1: wider all the way around than the trains themselves, which
Speaker 1: if I remember right, I think the tunnel is supposed
Speaker 1: to be about ten feet in diameter, and I which
Speaker 1: is roughly three ms. It's a little less than three meters. Well,
Speaker 1: the problem was this particular piece of line was designed
Speaker 1: to actually haul cargo cars, so it had they had
Speaker 1: to be bigger, so it was actually thirteen feet wide
Speaker 1: and sixteen feet tall. That's not great. So the danger
Speaker 1: in that is that this train that comes blowing through
Speaker 1: and should have just hit the end of the tunnel
Speaker 1: and compressed entirely horizontally, is now allowed to jump off
Speaker 1: of the tracks, hit the ceiling, hit the walls, ping
Speaker 1: pong all around, and bend in a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: places and therefore collapse not only horizontally, but bend vertically.
Speaker 1: And it did. The lead car was bent in three
Speaker 1: or in two places, so it was a total of
Speaker 1: three or something. Yeah, it was more of you almost, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was. It was really crazy the way the thing
Speaker 1: just I mean it, it did not was not designed
Speaker 1: to take that kind of impact, and it showed based
Speaker 1: on that tunnel. Although actually having a slightly wider tunnel
Speaker 1: was beneficial because it allowed us like rescue workers to
Speaker 1: squeeze between the train and the tunnel and forward that
Speaker 1: was only benefit that helped a little bit, a little bit.
Speaker 1: I mean, standard tube widths are they're you know, small, right,
Speaker 1: so it's a it's a tight fit, but they are
Speaker 1: designed to be able to vacate people through them. I mean,
Speaker 1: most of them are. I don't know about the London Underground,
Speaker 1: I haven't been in that one in a long time,
Speaker 1: but at least the ones like in Chicago and New York,
Speaker 1: like you have to have a way for passengers to
Speaker 1: exit the train and evacuate on either side, so there's
Speaker 1: you know, it's not wide, but it's a couple of feet.
Speaker 1: But in this case, you know when when when the
Speaker 1: trains hit, they sort of like crump. So that's where
Speaker 1: the problem. If it was a properly sized tube that
Speaker 1: would have it would have been a ten point two.
Speaker 1: It would have sealed a shut probably yeah yeah, well yeah,
Speaker 1: close to it anyway, yeah yeah yeah. If you look
Speaker 1: at this particular train, and we'll talk about this later,
Speaker 1: is part of what's known as the Stock and nineteen
Speaker 1: and most of the tube trains, they have a curved
Speaker 1: domey rough to them, but then at some point the
Speaker 1: sides of the car end up just running vertically up
Speaker 1: and down, because you've gotta have that flat edge, and
Speaker 1: that's the space that would allow people to somewhat make
Speaker 1: their way through, though not easily. They could get their
Speaker 1: way through. As to what you're referring to, So, as
Speaker 1: I always say, not surprisingly, a massive emergency crew was assembled,
Speaker 1: a massive rescue operation. What I want to know isn't
Speaker 1: you probably don't know this, but how big a boom
Speaker 1: and how far away wasn't heard? I do not know that,
Speaker 1: to be honest with you. It probably did, but I
Speaker 1: don't know how far it would have traveled, actually, because
Speaker 1: if you think about it, it's a lot of brick
Speaker 1: and concrete. But it's also in a tunnel system that
Speaker 1: has other trains making their own noise, and as you know,
Speaker 1: certain noises will help cancel each other out. So I
Speaker 1: don't know, I have no idea. But still, boom, Yeah
Speaker 1: it was. It was a hell of a boom. But
Speaker 1: rescue workers they show up, they find that the station
Speaker 1: is dark, it's it's smokey and dusty, and they had
Speaker 1: to work to get the people out. Now, what happens
Speaker 1: here is that the train goes into that an extra
Speaker 1: bit of tunnel, but the last three cars are still
Speaker 1: at the platform, so the people in those cars they
Speaker 1: can open the doors and they can get out, lucky them.
Speaker 1: But for everybody in the front three cars, it wasn't
Speaker 1: as good. And the rescue workers had to go down
Speaker 1: that side of the tunnel on the left and the
Speaker 1: right as you were talking about Devon, and they literally
Speaker 1: had to cut the cars open because the doors were
Speaker 1: just completely few shut in the compression process. I'm assuming
Speaker 1: that they were using saws and not torches when they
Speaker 1: were cutting these people out, but I don't know that
Speaker 1: for sure. They might have the temperature, and there a
Speaker 1: lot they did because the temperature the fire brigade, I
Speaker 1: can't think of who it was that that one of
Speaker 1: the responders. I read a whole bunch of stuff on
Speaker 1: their site, but they talked about, you know, they show
Speaker 1: up in full fire garb, and then they're quickly stripping
Speaker 1: down to basically just T shirts and their pants if
Speaker 1: they can. Because the temperatures rose quite quickly to nine
Speaker 1: to a hundred and twenty degrees fahrenheit or converting that,
Speaker 1: that's thirty two degrees celsius. So it's freaking hot. Because
Speaker 1: I just sort of engineers mind, I was sort of
Speaker 1: thinking about the logistics of that situation. I'm thinking that
Speaker 1: now I bet they have like some gigantic fans that
Speaker 1: they can break. Wouldn't be for this and something that's magnitude.
Speaker 1: They're probably probably about some gigantic fans to make sure
Speaker 1: this doesn't happen again. Though, Oh my god, it must
Speaker 1: have been uncomfortable down there. This has the heat. I mean,
Speaker 1: just imagine breathing all that smoke and dust and you know,
Speaker 1: dead bodies and yeah, no, I can't imagine that it
Speaker 1: was good. Now, as we said, you know, they got
Speaker 1: to cut these cars open because they've compressed in. The
Speaker 1: doors are all squished shut and sealed. To give you
Speaker 1: a little bit of context, because I've said this a
Speaker 1: couple of times, everything was compressed shut. For context, each
Speaker 1: of the car ours that went into that tunnel was
Speaker 1: they were fifty two ft long. That tunnel was sixty
Speaker 1: six ft long. There was two and a half cars
Speaker 1: crammed into that sixty six ft of tunnel, which means
Speaker 1: take two popkins and just empty popkins and squeeze them
Speaker 1: down to the length of one. And I don't give
Speaker 1: you a really good idea of how much damage that does.
Speaker 1: It's it's pretty phenomenal. Indeed, luckily I wasn't around. Not surprisingly,
Speaker 1: not everybody survived the accident. There were a total of
Speaker 1: three hundred people on the train. Of those three hundred,
Speaker 1: forty two people died on the scene, and I see
Speaker 1: conflicting accounts that it's either one or two people died
Speaker 1: after the fact from the injuries that they sustained. A
Speaker 1: total of seventy four additional people were treated four injuries
Speaker 1: that they got, So that's that's over a hundred, still
Speaker 1: over a third of the passenger. But somehow like hundred
Speaker 1: and a hundred eighty people walked away with like minor injury.
Speaker 1: So for a crash of this magnitude, that's pretty incredible.
Speaker 1: The people in the first two cars were the majority
Speaker 1: of the death. It's so the people in the back
Speaker 1: back couple of cars. They got tossed around, but they
Speaker 1: were in almost no damage of dying, and they fell
Speaker 1: the wrong way. Crazy. I wonder if there's a major
Speaker 1: trend after that for people to ride in the back
Speaker 1: I you know, I don't know, that's a that's a
Speaker 1: good question. I have no idea. Would in the first
Speaker 1: I think it's in the first eighteen hours all of
Speaker 1: the injured passengers got off the train. The final body
Speaker 1: wasn't removed from the train though, for four days total.
Speaker 1: But do we know how long it took, on average
Speaker 1: for them to remove the rest of the dead bodies.
Speaker 1: We don't. We don't know how long it took to
Speaker 1: remove those those other dead bodies, which I know where
Speaker 1: you're going for labor stuff. We don't. We don't know
Speaker 1: how thought it was like they got almost everybody out
Speaker 1: in the first twenty four hours too. I believe it
Speaker 1: was all of the people who were injured and a
Speaker 1: majority of the casualties. But I have a feeling the
Speaker 1: people that were in the very first car were the
Speaker 1: hardest to get because of the way it compressed and bent. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well it took him four days to get Yeah. They
Speaker 1: The last body that they get out is the driver
Speaker 1: of the train, the motor min as they're referred to,
Speaker 1: and the particularly driver. His name was Leslie newsoen He
Speaker 1: and he was a fifty six year old guy. He'd
Speaker 1: been working for the two for about six years at
Speaker 1: that point. He six or seven years though for the
Speaker 1: first until the last year of his life. He'd been
Speaker 1: working as a guard, because you gotta remember, somebody's got
Speaker 1: to walk through and help with the doors and keep
Speaker 1: an eye on the passengers so no bad stuff happens.
Speaker 1: And that's what the guard is for, and that's what
Speaker 1: he did. But we do presume that the guard is
Speaker 1: at least, you know, peripherally trained in do not operation.
Speaker 1: That is not the case, not even at all. RED
Speaker 1: guards is supposed to be trained. And how the trains function. Well,
Speaker 1: I understood that they were training in the basic functions,
Speaker 1: but they had to actually go through training to drive
Speaker 1: a train. They might be able to operate. That's why
Speaker 1: I said it's peripherally educated. Okay, yeah, but they understand
Speaker 1: things like especially how the brake systems were. You wouldn't
Speaker 1: need to know how like all that stuff. Okay, I
Speaker 1: guess I was taking that into larger context the Okay,
Speaker 1: now I got you vaguely understand how the thing works. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: so that if an emergency happened, they could take over,
Speaker 1: like pull the brake handle. Yeah. And actually, I gotta
Speaker 1: tell you, I have seen video of people driving the trains,
Speaker 1: and actually I think I could do it. It's not
Speaker 1: a complex machine to operate, and I will say that.
Speaker 1: I was about to say, I don't believe it's an
Speaker 1: easy machine to operate, but I don't believe it's complex.
Speaker 1: And well I know that, I know that. Right now,
Speaker 1: there's there's some too operated that's listening to this and
Speaker 1: he's fuming, and I just want to say, dude, i'd
Speaker 1: realize your job was harder than it looks. But set
Speaker 1: us an email. Anyway, Yeah, where were we Well, what
Speaker 1: we were gonna say is we were talking about Leslie
Speaker 1: Newsoon did go les I don't know that, to be honest.
Speaker 1: I thought I've seen it online, people calling him last
Speaker 1: but I was just gonna use his last name to
Speaker 1: be safe, right, let's just go Okay. So, by all accounts,
Speaker 1: Newsome was a good driver, and he took his job seriously.
Speaker 1: Like I said, he'd only been driving trains for the
Speaker 1: past year, and he according to his his wife and children,
Speaker 1: he wasn't a drinker and when he had a drink drink,
Speaker 1: which was very rare, it was only on holidays and
Speaker 1: he might have one or two brown ales. He only
Speaker 1: called out of work for a total of two days
Speaker 1: in the fire. The six or seven years he worked
Speaker 1: for the tube, So that's a good record. And his
Speaker 1: coworkers said that he didn't really have many friends, but
Speaker 1: generally he was a very cautious driver. He was known
Speaker 1: to the typical process, and this is a very general statement,
Speaker 1: so please understand that was there was a point where
Speaker 1: you should start to begin breaking to get to a
Speaker 1: minimum speed and then stop at the platform. He was
Speaker 1: known for just shutting off the engines before that minimum
Speaker 1: distance and letting the train coast almost entirely, and so
Speaker 1: he barely had to use the brakes at all. So
Speaker 1: it seems like a nice smooth ride, yes, which I've
Speaker 1: been on some trains that weren't so so I appreciate
Speaker 1: and that might that might have been him. I mean,
Speaker 1: I we'll talk about this a little later. But they
Speaker 1: were also maintenance issues on the train. He might have
Speaker 1: been one of these guys that didn't want to put
Speaker 1: any stress on this brake because he thought, well, I
Speaker 1: might need those something. That is something he was known
Speaker 1: for keeping a logbook of maintenance issues, and so that
Speaker 1: is one thing that was found on in his belongings.
Speaker 1: Trains had some maintenance issues. So overall, though the description
Speaker 1: that we just gave of Nussen does not jive with
Speaker 1: what the official investigation and found and decided because they
Speaker 1: say that the entire incident was due to operator error. Um.
Speaker 1: When you look at the you guys looked through the
Speaker 1: the accident report, it's quite long, although the map at
Speaker 1: the end was really really useful. But according to the
Speaker 1: witnesses who were at the station, Newson was standing up
Speaker 1: and staring straight ahead as the train passed through the
Speaker 1: station with his hand in the full throttle position. Are
Speaker 1: you gonna at some point, I presume we'll talk about
Speaker 1: how these trains are operated, how somebody could say it
Speaker 1: was in the full throttle, probably in much more detail
Speaker 1: than some people really want, because that's the way I
Speaker 1: am with these mechanical bits and pieces. Okay, but we'll
Speaker 1: pause on that until you get there, okay, because well
Speaker 1: we'll hold off. This is still kind of the general stuff.
Speaker 1: Uh So, like I said this, the witnesses said that
Speaker 1: they saw him going through the station with his hands
Speaker 1: in the full throttle position. Ordering to the official investigation,
Speaker 1: they they felt like this witness statement was true because
Speaker 1: they say that when his body was removed from the train,
Speaker 1: it appeared that his hands prior to the impact must
Speaker 1: have been in that position. And they also X rayed
Speaker 1: his arms in his hands because, according to the official investigation,
Speaker 1: what they expected to see was that his bones would
Speaker 1: have been broken in a recognizable manner of a person
Speaker 1: realizing they're going to run into something doing that defensive
Speaker 1: gesture where you put you cross your arms and put
Speaker 1: them in front of your head. We've all seen this
Speaker 1: on TV and movies. That's what they expected. And because
Speaker 1: the breaks in his arms and hands weren't consistent with
Speaker 1: that position, they said, yeah, I know, his hands must
Speaker 1: have been on the controls. They can't say where the
Speaker 1: controls were, but they say his hands had to have
Speaker 1: been on the actual control that well even I mean,
Speaker 1: but even if they were, they can't say, oh, he
Speaker 1: was frantically trying to break or he was accelerating full throttle.
Speaker 1: All they can say is they were probably in the
Speaker 1: same area where the controls were. Yep, that's absolutely right.
Speaker 1: And and to be honest, the um so the statement
Speaker 1: that of his hands where his hands were is a
Speaker 1: bit dodgy to me because drivers typically would operate the train,
Speaker 1: most of them would operate the train without the cab
Speaker 1: light on, so it didn't create glare and stuff like
Speaker 1: that so they can see a head well when coming
Speaker 1: into the station. The inquest did a bunch of tests
Speaker 1: and they had drivers with light onto, the light off,
Speaker 1: with a height off. You can see the general silhouette
Speaker 1: of the person, but you can't actually discern what position
Speaker 1: their hands are in. In other words, full power off,
Speaker 1: pulling the brake, not pulling the brake. You can just
Speaker 1: kind of generally see their silhouette. So I would see
Speaker 1: it because I'd be running away. Well. Witness reports are
Speaker 1: often like really hold like having not in the not
Speaker 1: too long ago future, tried to give a witness testimony,
Speaker 1: as you know whatever from something that I thought I
Speaker 1: saw very clearly, and then realizing I actually have no
Speaker 1: idea if what I'm saying is accurate or not, like
Speaker 1: it's I mean, and that is the reason why I
Speaker 1: am inclined to disregard the statement of the witness named
Speaker 1: I A. But I kid you not that is his name. Yes,
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure it's pronounced in this country, but an
Speaker 1: unfortunate name. So this was a horrible, horrible incident. I mean,
Speaker 1: like we said, a lot of people lost their lives,
Speaker 1: a lot of injuries, but The good things that came
Speaker 1: out of it were two. The first of which is
Speaker 1: that the speed limits for trains that were coming to
Speaker 1: the the not the the actual end of the line
Speaker 1: dead ends was reduced from fifteen to ten miles per
Speaker 1: hour to help ensure that somebody couldn't be asleep at
Speaker 1: the wheel and driving fifteen and drive all the way through.
Speaker 1: The Other thing that came through is that in night
Speaker 1: the Morgate Protection System was introduced, which it was an
Speaker 1: automated system that if after a certain point a train
Speaker 1: wasn't below a certain speed, it automatically turned on the brakes.
Speaker 1: So truly automated the I shouldn't say truly, but to
Speaker 1: a large extent, automated the brakes so that if somebody's
Speaker 1: not paying attention and they're flying through there, the train
Speaker 1: is gonna stop. Because that's the problem with this incident
Speaker 1: is that, according to everybody, the train never hit its brakes.
Speaker 1: It just flew through full throttle. Here's my favorite part
Speaker 1: about this. Wasn't it the train crash that happened in
Speaker 1: America like two years ago where suddenly they were like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know what we should have on our commuter rail? Yes,
Speaker 1: safety things yeah, you should make some safety stuff because
Speaker 1: be safe and stuff. Yeah, that would help, Yeah, you
Speaker 1: know thirty years after if nothing else, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: like like a big guy to stand be handed driver
Speaker 1: and sort of step in when things go south and
Speaker 1: say excuse me, just no, not excuse me, just knocking
Speaker 1: out of the way and grab the controls. Um. I
Speaker 1: know we're close to theories here, but just quickly, tube
Speaker 1: drivers do they sit or stand? Stand? Stand in the stock?
Speaker 1: I understood that they stood. I did not ever see
Speaker 1: a seat in any of the photos of the driver's
Speaker 1: section of the train, which suddenly the names escaped me cab, cab,
Speaker 1: thank you. I'll work with that. So, yes, there is
Speaker 1: not a seat that I just wanted to clarify any
Speaker 1: other questions before we know, well, before we get into theories,
Speaker 1: let's take a really quick break. Hi there, Joe here
Speaker 1: from Thinking Sideways the podcast, Well, it finally happened. There's
Speaker 1: another podcast out there, and finally somebody cut into a
Speaker 1: great idea and they're doing it too. Uh. And so
Speaker 1: if you do have room in your life for a
Speaker 1: second podcast, do I want to give this one a look?
Speaker 1: Or I guess I'll listen. It's called The First Day Back,
Speaker 1: and it's kind of intriguing sounding. The concept is how
Speaker 1: does a person return from an event that changes them? Uh?
Speaker 1: The news story for this new season apparently it's spent it.
Speaker 1: This is the second season. It's about a woman who's
Speaker 1: just getting out of prison. She was in prison because
Speaker 1: she accidentally shut and killed her husband. And here's the kicker,
Speaker 1: she has no memory of it, and the show explains
Speaker 1: what happened that night and also just everything that comes after,
Speaker 1: like what's it like to on your first day out
Speaker 1: of prison? How do you readjust how do you find
Speaker 1: a job? Can you reconnect with your family? And all?
Speaker 1: That's the easy part, of course. The hard part is
Speaker 1: figuring out how to live with the guilt of what
Speaker 1: she did and try to find some forgiveness herself. So
Speaker 1: that's what it's about. The bottom line is how do
Speaker 1: you come back from the worst thing you've ever done,
Speaker 1: especially when you don't even remember doing it. The show
Speaker 1: is called First Day Back. It's on Stitcher and well
Speaker 1: wherever else you'd listen to podcasts. Okay, and we're back
Speaker 1: And I'm a little upset with you, Joe, because where's
Speaker 1: my sandwich? I've had that thing in the fridge for
Speaker 1: a while now, and I've slowly been working my way through,
Speaker 1: and i want to know where my footlong sandwich is
Speaker 1: at here. Here's all you gotta do is follow your nose. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: let's get onto theories. Theory number one, which shouldn't be
Speaker 1: any surprise to anybody, because this is always there in
Speaker 1: an accident situation, he'll have to start a new life.
Speaker 1: He faked his own death. No, actually, that's wrong kind
Speaker 1: of mystery, wrong kind of mystery. No, this is he
Speaker 1: was drunk, because drunk is always it. People say, well,
Speaker 1: he had to have and drunk to have driven the
Speaker 1: train into the end of the tunnel and and not
Speaker 1: have slowed, not applied the brakes. And one of the
Speaker 1: things that is always referred to, and you see this
Speaker 1: in the official inquest, is that when they tested his blood,
Speaker 1: they found that he had eighty milligrams per one milli
Speaker 1: leaders of alcohol in his blood, which by my math
Speaker 1: comes out to point oh eight b a C meaning
Speaker 1: legally drunk in this country, in the US, at our
Speaker 1: state high in different places more like four. But I
Speaker 1: could be wrong about that. Well, and there's some things
Speaker 1: to take into consideration here, the first of which is
Speaker 1: that the doctor, and it's referred to strangely in a
Speaker 1: lot of the reporting, but the doctor who took the
Speaker 1: samples and wrote the report said that she took samples
Speaker 1: from eight other bodies that were in the same conditions
Speaker 1: as Nuisance, and that his blood alcohol content was double
Speaker 1: any of the other bodies on and I'm assuming they
Speaker 1: were bodies from that actual accident scene. You know, we've
Speaker 1: talked about this before, but we'll do it again. Is
Speaker 1: that the human body, when it expires, is capable of
Speaker 1: creating alcohol, or I should probably correct that it's the
Speaker 1: bacteria that are feeding upon the human body that make
Speaker 1: alcohol as a byproduct. And the warmer it is, the
Speaker 1: faster they work and the faster they grow and eat,
Speaker 1: and therefore about alcohol not alcohol, no, no, but think
Speaker 1: about the conditions we described, which is a tunnel that
Speaker 1: is between ninety two a hundred and twenty degree it
Speaker 1: did it got it gets really hot in there, so
Speaker 1: depending on so there's there's some things that we don't
Speaker 1: we don't we don't get the answers to which is
Speaker 1: we know that his body was in there for four days,
Speaker 1: but we don't know how long the other bodies that
Speaker 1: were sampled, we're actually in the tunnel before they were moved,
Speaker 1: and I'm presuming sent to a morgue where they were
Speaker 1: then put into a cooler, which would have stopped a
Speaker 1: little bacteria from continuing to generate alcohol. Yeah, he was
Speaker 1: definitely the last out. Yea saying goes first in last out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is the old saying. So let's just let's run
Speaker 1: with the theory. Though. Yeah, there are other issues here though,
Speaker 1: I mean there are there are. So if we run
Speaker 1: with the theory and we think about this, let's let's
Speaker 1: think about, well, when could he have had his drinks
Speaker 1: when he could have could have been drinking? Well, there's
Speaker 1: before or on the job. Those are the two simple
Speaker 1: answers there. If we think about on the job. The
Speaker 1: morning of the accident, sometime between six ten and six
Speaker 1: twenty four, which was the start of the shift, Newson
Speaker 1: had tea with some of the other drivers, and one
Speaker 1: of whom asked if he could borrow some milk, and
Speaker 1: he allowed him to, and that driver said the milk
Speaker 1: didn't taste of alcohol, so obviously he wasn't spiking his tea.
Speaker 1: As he was driving through the day. That to me
Speaker 1: means that he must have consumed it, probably before he
Speaker 1: would have gotten to work, because drinking on the job
Speaker 1: is really obvious because it's a semi open cab situation.
Speaker 1: I'll take a little issue with that and say that,
Speaker 1: you know, to go cups are a thing he could
Speaker 1: have you been having a bunch of alcohol in like
Speaker 1: a styrofied flask. No, it's like a styrofoam cup that
Speaker 1: looks like coffee or something like that. Those were Those
Speaker 1: were very popular in those days. It is. But the
Speaker 1: thing is is that I can't imagine nobody that nobody
Speaker 1: that he interacted with said that he a smelled of
Speaker 1: booze or be acted weird. So it seems a little
Speaker 1: weird that he would have done it beforehand. No, I'm
Speaker 1: just I'm saying I'm taking issue with drinking on the job.
Speaker 1: But the other thing I was going to say is
Speaker 1: that the guard on the train interacted with Nussen through
Speaker 1: the two hour or hour prior to the accident and
Speaker 1: never saw anything. And it's not like the driver can
Speaker 1: hold his cup least driving the train. That's true. Most
Speaker 1: like to see a cup holder mostly just playing Devil's
Speaker 1: after training but I will also mention that maybe the
Speaker 1: testimony of that guard is not the most sounds. He
Speaker 1: was an eighteen year old kid, and he wasn't really
Speaker 1: paying attention. He's actually quite scolded in the report for
Speaker 1: lack of diligence in his duties. Well, and he should have.
Speaker 1: It should have been like mostly at the back of
Speaker 1: the train anyway, so there would have been plenty of
Speaker 1: time it would have been around the driver. But but
Speaker 1: I also agree he probably wasn't drinking before. I mean,
Speaker 1: the co workers. If they went so far to say, well,
Speaker 1: the milk wasn't alcohol, they probably would have gone so
Speaker 1: far to also say, also, he wasn't drunk when we
Speaker 1: were hanging out with him, at least not drunk enough
Speaker 1: to cratch a train. Should have been stumbling at six
Speaker 1: in the morning. To have been that unaware he had to,
Speaker 1: he would have had been super stumbly, you know, belligerently drunk,
Speaker 1: and he did not appear to be that way though
Speaker 1: his family they did have booze in the house. There
Speaker 1: was a reporter that went over and she looked, he
Speaker 1: was like, where did you keep the drink cabinet? And
Speaker 1: they looked and sure, if there's Bacardi because everybody says, well,
Speaker 1: he must have been drinking something that didn't have a smell.
Speaker 1: And I gotta tell you that only vodka drinkers and
Speaker 1: sometimes gin drinkers are the ones who believe that you
Speaker 1: can't smell that stuff. But yeah, and they're wrong, they're wrong.
Speaker 1: Everybody else can smell that stuff. So and also adults
Speaker 1: have Bacardi in the house, like, calm down. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: saw that report and it was like she admitted that
Speaker 1: it might be down a little bit in the level,
Speaker 1: but she didn't know. She didn't know. And the thing
Speaker 1: about it is is this is like how many months
Speaker 1: or years, nine months after the fact. Yeah, So I mean,
Speaker 1: I gotta tell you it would have been in my
Speaker 1: house that would have been like not down a little bit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it would have been gone replaced. But I was gonna say,
Speaker 1: I'm going to be in big trouble if I ever
Speaker 1: like getting a crash and they're like, well, let's go
Speaker 1: see your alcohol continet. You have alcohol in your house,
Speaker 1: Oh well you must have been drunk. Like I'm I'm
Speaker 1: out of luck at that point that if that's how
Speaker 1: we're doing this now now to give a little bit
Speaker 1: of credence to the he should have been drunk or
Speaker 1: he was drunk theory. If indeed his b a c
Speaker 1: was double the other people on the train, let's just
Speaker 1: say the bacteria created point oh four blood alcohol content.
Speaker 1: That means that he had to have at the time
Speaker 1: of the accident had point oh four already in his system.
Speaker 1: So he may not have truly been belligerently blasted drunk.
Speaker 1: But still point oh four, that's that's pretty drunk, and
Speaker 1: you and it should have been smells, behavioral issues, and
Speaker 1: none of that really comes up. So but also, like,
Speaker 1: did he I mean, you know, so he did an
Speaker 1: entire run of a train. He'd been doing runs all morning, right,
Speaker 1: was he having a hard time hitting the stops at
Speaker 1: all the other places? I mean, it's not as though,
Speaker 1: especially in the less than ten minutes it takes to
Speaker 1: do the run. We're not saying like, oh, and you
Speaker 1: know it was weird because he was lurching into every
Speaker 1: single stop he was missing he stops, those were pretty
Speaker 1: hard stops to hit as well, and he made those
Speaker 1: all fine. So what happened in the what two minutes
Speaker 1: between the last stop and the final stuff? I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know, but I mean it had to have been,
Speaker 1: but it had to have been at the beginning of there.
Speaker 1: I mean, I've been I've been over the legal limit,
Speaker 1: at least I think so. I've never actually blown a
Speaker 1: breathalyzer before, but I'm sure I've been over the leg
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure you have to. And I have never
Speaker 1: crashed the train. Yeah, So anecdotally, we're proving this theory bad.
Speaker 1: This is a poor theory and and it was dismissed
Speaker 1: by the official inquiry, though there are people who still
Speaker 1: feel that it's correct. But we'll leave that theory behind
Speaker 1: and we'll move to the next one. I hate this one,
Speaker 1: I know you do, and I'm not I'm not very
Speaker 1: keen on it though it's rather popular, which is that
Speaker 1: Nussen was decided to commit suicide and just happened to
Speaker 1: take forty three other poor souls along with him. He
Speaker 1: decided to to you know, it was death by train.
Speaker 1: He decided that was his method to go. There are
Speaker 1: a lot of issues with this. There are the first
Speaker 1: of which is that people say, well, he he obviously
Speaker 1: knew what he was doing, and he did it, did
Speaker 1: it intentionally. That's why he was seen standing upright in
Speaker 1: the cab when he came through the station, and they say,
Speaker 1: you know, the fact that he didn't cover his his
Speaker 1: head with his arms shows that he was also doing
Speaker 1: it willfully and it wasn't um, you know, it wasn't
Speaker 1: it oh crap moment He's like, I'm doing, I'm doing.
Speaker 1: He was just hanging on again, doing it intentionally. But
Speaker 1: as with all suicide theories, this doesn't made up with
Speaker 1: anybody who knows him, because as we've seen this in
Speaker 1: a lot of stories, his family, his co workers, they
Speaker 1: all say that he didn't have any signs of depression,
Speaker 1: he didn't show any signs of being suicidal, nothing like
Speaker 1: that was present. Though we have talked about the fact
Speaker 1: that there can be that spur of the moment, hidden
Speaker 1: hidden feelings people don't want to admit or don't see.
Speaker 1: But the thing that I have a problem with the
Speaker 1: whole suicide theory is that the day before Newson had
Speaker 1: sent his wife to the bank to get three hundred
Speaker 1: pound so that he could then go buy a car
Speaker 1: for his daughter, and he had that money on him,
Speaker 1: which to me indicates he's planning to go from work
Speaker 1: to buy the car, to take the car home, which
Speaker 1: in my estimation would not be the actions of a
Speaker 1: man who was planning to take his own life. Actually,
Speaker 1: it occurs to me he has a daughter who was
Speaker 1: of the age that he was buying a car for,
Speaker 1: so that could account for why the liquor was maybe
Speaker 1: a little lower and originally anticipated. I mean, you know
Speaker 1: there were teenage kids in the house. But no, I
Speaker 1: mean I agree, it's it's that same thing. What was
Speaker 1: the case we talked about recently with the guy who
Speaker 1: apparently stabbed himself three times as as yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: he and again we had that issue where he apparently
Speaker 1: made himself a meal and and stabbed himself again. It's
Speaker 1: it's like, wait that that there's there's a level of
Speaker 1: drunk and get intentional that I don't think so I
Speaker 1: I will agree. I don't know about you, Joe, but
Speaker 1: I personally am willing very easily to discount suicide. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't really buy it either. I could I could
Speaker 1: picture murder. Actually. Actually, the one thing that sort of
Speaker 1: turns in my head, and this one is like you've
Speaker 1: seen this in the movies or TV or whatever. We're
Speaker 1: there's a guy and for some reason, because some some
Speaker 1: international cabal of the bio terrorists have got the goods
Speaker 1: on him, and they he doesn't the crash the train,
Speaker 1: or they'll kill his family or something, and so I yeah,
Speaker 1: so I sort of I sort of went with that
Speaker 1: theory just for fun, you know, of course, you know
Speaker 1: we've seen in the movies, right, Well, if it happens
Speaker 1: in the movies, it happens in real life. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: there's that. So that would be suicide but not really voluntary. Involuntary,
Speaker 1: so technically murdered, but I don't see any real evidence
Speaker 1: of that. It's a nice one, juicy. Yeah, yeah, there
Speaker 1: yours not the real theory. Um, so let's go to
Speaker 1: our next next theory. He had a medical condition which
Speaker 1: was the cause of the entire accident. The inquisition, they
Speaker 1: looked into a lot of things to try and figure
Speaker 1: out if indeed something had happened. You know, they checked
Speaker 1: his heart to see if maybe he had suffered a
Speaker 1: heart attack. They did tests which I'm not exactly clear on,
Speaker 1: but they were trying to figure out if he had
Speaker 1: had a seizure of some kind that would have locked
Speaker 1: up his muscles so that he couldn't release the controls
Speaker 1: of the train. Those are hard to nothing was found
Speaker 1: from it, well, yeah, especially because I mean I I
Speaker 1: presume that his body took a fair amount of damage
Speaker 1: in the crash, so it would be hard to massive
Speaker 1: trauma to the head massive He would be really hard
Speaker 1: to kind of diagnose any of those things. After the field,
Speaker 1: I think the just about everything would have been kind
Speaker 1: of exploded. They did examine his body to see if
Speaker 1: he had been electrocuted, because the trains, they're electric trains,
Speaker 1: and there was the possibility that a current could have
Speaker 1: for some reason gone through the metal controls that he
Speaker 1: was holding, would have gone through his body and then
Speaker 1: through his feet back into the metal decking. That would
Speaker 1: have been the current. Him standing in the same spot
Speaker 1: and keeping his grip, Yeah, because he's being being shocked
Speaker 1: and therefore all of his muscles are contracted and he
Speaker 1: cannot physically let go. That probably would have left some marks,
Speaker 1: though there were none, so definitely couldn't have been that.
Speaker 1: So I don't believe that that was it. UM. I
Speaker 1: have a couple of medical theories. Okay, Yeah, One thing is,
Speaker 1: you know, fifty three is not that old, but um
Speaker 1: early signs of dementia can't account for UM kind of
Speaker 1: black out locked in syndrome. I kind of looked into
Speaker 1: that and it seems like there should have been a
Speaker 1: lot more symptoms. Well, it's hard. Early signs of dementias
Speaker 1: particularly are really hard because there are things like you
Speaker 1: are a little more forgetful than you usually are, or
Speaker 1: you have blackouts or you know, blah blah blah, and
Speaker 1: these are all things that you have to self report,
Speaker 1: and especially you know British stiff upper lip. You know,
Speaker 1: at fifty six, it's likely if it was just starting
Speaker 1: to happen, that he would have not even mentioned it,
Speaker 1: or even his wife would have said, it's funny you
Speaker 1: you keep leaving your keys all around, you know, and
Speaker 1: you keep asking me where they are, and they're sitting
Speaker 1: right there. What's you know, what's going on? Oh, it's
Speaker 1: you know, just getting older. It's it's normal aging. And
Speaker 1: I mean that's one thing that could account for it,
Speaker 1: because you you can suffer these like really just blackouts
Speaker 1: basically where your brain just stops functioning but your body
Speaker 1: is still functioning. I So my my one problem with that, well,
Speaker 1: it's it's a very popular reason today. It's it's it's
Speaker 1: the Darling diagnosis. It's it's the diagnosis. Well, no, just
Speaker 1: just for things today, for in our current i'd say
Speaker 1: last decade, it's like, oh, well, I bet you was
Speaker 1: early onset dimension dimension. I feel like I see that
Speaker 1: a lot in stories more than I used to. I
Speaker 1: think they're just getting better at diagnosing it, because I mean, again,
Speaker 1: it's one of those things where, you know, fifty years
Speaker 1: ago people were like, I don't know that he's forgetful,
Speaker 1: but there are there are things that do tend to
Speaker 1: get kind of over diagnosed. Absolutely, but I mean that
Speaker 1: would have been one. And then he also could have,
Speaker 1: you know, had that he could have just had a
Speaker 1: little bit of a seizure or a stroke or something
Speaker 1: like that, and that would be really hard. That would
Speaker 1: be hard, especially for the kind of damage that his
Speaker 1: body took. To figure out post mortem, it would be um.
Speaker 1: It was suggested that along the this kind of I
Speaker 1: know dovetails into the dementia is that it was suggested
Speaker 1: that maybe he was just kind of daydreaming and not Yeah,
Speaker 1: I kind of got hypnotized and that's what caused it.
Speaker 1: Except one thing to keep in mind is that it's
Speaker 1: two sets of rails that go north south, so one
Speaker 1: is the south line, one is the north line, and
Speaker 1: they cross each other just before the platform, and where
Speaker 1: that X happens, there is a notable jump or jolt
Speaker 1: to the train. It's it's a bump, it's you know.
Speaker 1: So that and the noise of the platform, everybody says
Speaker 1: should have been enough that if the motor min was
Speaker 1: literally just gathering wool, he should have come to his
Speaker 1: senses quite quickly based on that alone, and that should
Speaker 1: have jolted him. I guess this is I'm just doing
Speaker 1: the Devil's advocate thing for this one. But haven't you
Speaker 1: ever had those times where you're kind of staring off
Speaker 1: into space and somebody says something and you kind of
Speaker 1: come back, but you keep staring off in a space.
Speaker 1: Do you ever have that? Oh? I get that a
Speaker 1: lot where like actually sometimes I get into physical pain
Speaker 1: if I like snap out of it too fast to
Speaker 1: stare off into space since somebody says something and I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: here I am, but I have to keep staring off
Speaker 1: or else. Okay, now I can come back, don't come
Speaker 1: back in phase? Is not all at once, but uh,
Speaker 1: one would present that he could have come back in
Speaker 1: a couple of stages and still made it. I think, Yeah,
Speaker 1: just that just doesn't really seem to happen to that
Speaker 1: many people, because if it did, we have a lot
Speaker 1: more dead pedestrians and things like that. You know. So
Speaker 1: you're saying, is I'm weird. I'm saying that you are
Speaker 1: probably not the norm in that. The good news is
Speaker 1: I don't do it when I'm driving. Well, thank goodness. Um,
Speaker 1: Now there were the other thing that and again this
Speaker 1: is the things that were really hard to diagnose properly,
Speaker 1: is there were suggestions that he had he had suffered
Speaker 1: what were some pretty rare or exotic conditions that that
Speaker 1: are a cute you know, they just happened that one
Speaker 1: or two times. That would be akin to like, as
Speaker 1: you said, the locked in scenario, you know, locked in
Speaker 1: his brain but not able to move. But those are
Speaker 1: things that that are just so difficult to diagnose, just
Speaker 1: disregarded by the the investigating committee. Yeah, and again, I
Speaker 1: mean blackouts can be just a one off, you know,
Speaker 1: a couple of time things they don't even have to
Speaker 1: be associated with anything. Your brain can just be like,
Speaker 1: you know, buy for a little bit. And usually granted,
Speaker 1: usually those do coincide with the you collapse or blah blah.
Speaker 1: But it is possible to have your brain go and
Speaker 1: not your body at least for a couple of minutes.
Speaker 1: It seems rather unlikely, though. We're gonna move on to
Speaker 1: the next theory. The next theory is mechanical failure, and
Speaker 1: it's got a couple of subsections to it. So there's
Speaker 1: actually some explanation that I need to do. I was
Speaker 1: gonna say, you need to tell us about the mechanics first,
Speaker 1: I do. I do. So. First off, I talked about
Speaker 1: this earlier, is that the train that was the train
Speaker 1: that was involved, it was a tube stock, and again
Speaker 1: that is the stock of trains that is used in
Speaker 1: the tube. They had been in service at that time
Speaker 1: for over forty years. They did. And you know, these trains,
Speaker 1: they apparently worked well because currently some of them, though
Speaker 1: they've been decommissioned in the tube, there's still some of
Speaker 1: them running on the aisle of White. So those trains
Speaker 1: weren't all that bad that as long as they were maintained.
Speaker 1: I think that was one of the issues. And well,
Speaker 1: we're gonna get into that. But before we get into
Speaker 1: maintenance stuff, let's talk about the train operation, because that
Speaker 1: that's going to really be paramount for the stuff that's
Speaker 1: coming up for I get into the train operation. I
Speaker 1: have to say thank you to both Alistair and Anthony.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much to those guys for helping me
Speaker 1: understand the nuts and bolts of how the cab worked.
Speaker 1: That really really made a big difference for me. So
Speaker 1: here's how the train works. The driver stands in the
Speaker 1: cab and has their left hand and their right hand
Speaker 1: on top of for lack of a better term, two
Speaker 1: columns and left and in the right hand column. The
Speaker 1: left hand column has a control on it that swings
Speaker 1: back and forth, and that is the application of the brakes.
Speaker 1: It's the brake handle. So the right hand column had
Speaker 1: the speed control for the train, which was a lever system.
Speaker 1: So think about if there's a clock laying in a
Speaker 1: plane in front of you. The lever is off when
Speaker 1: it's at the three o'clock position, and then the driver
Speaker 1: would pull it and it would rotate to the six
Speaker 1: o'clock position and out. That's correctly if I'm wrong, but
Speaker 1: I had heard very read they have to push down
Speaker 1: on it. I'm not there yet. I'm not there yet.
Speaker 1: That's the dead man switch part. I'm not there yet,
Speaker 1: So taking this in pieces, so you would move it
Speaker 1: from three o'clock to six o'clock to put the train
Speaker 1: into forward go, you know, to get power, and the
Speaker 1: easy way that there's this whole cereal and parallel thing
Speaker 1: which we'll talk about later, but think of it as
Speaker 1: a low and a high gear. Low gears at six
Speaker 1: o'clock and then when the train had enough speed, you
Speaker 1: would continue to push it to the left in an
Speaker 1: arc to the nine o'clock position, and that's where it's
Speaker 1: high gear. That's the basics of the control of the operation.
Speaker 1: What you were talking about, Joe, is the dead man
Speaker 1: switch component of the control, and that is when it's
Speaker 1: in the three o'clock position. In order to move that lever,
Speaker 1: the operator of the train has to push it down
Speaker 1: and it took fifteen pounds of force to get it
Speaker 1: down enough before it would begin to rotate, and then
Speaker 1: then from there on they had to keep three pounds
Speaker 1: pressure on it. But it is a dead man switch,
Speaker 1: and everybody you know what a dead man switches, whether
Speaker 1: you realize it or not. Because we're going to go
Speaker 1: back to the movies. There's that scene in the movies
Speaker 1: where the bad guy's got a bomb and he's holding
Speaker 1: a switch in his hand. If the good guy shoot
Speaker 1: him and he dies, he'll let go and the bomb
Speaker 1: will go off and drama ensues. But basically it is
Speaker 1: if somebody lets go of the switch and it turns off,
Speaker 1: something is going to happen. Basic simple driver moves it
Speaker 1: to six walk and doesn't keep pressure on it and
Speaker 1: let's go. For some reason the breaks on the train.
Speaker 1: The dead man function would activate the brakes and stop
Speaker 1: the train. So that let's say somebody sneaks up and
Speaker 1: clubs our driver in the back of the head and
Speaker 1: he lets go of the controls, the train is going
Speaker 1: to automatically stop. And he said, how how much weight
Speaker 1: does it to? How much pressure does it take? Three
Speaker 1: pounds of pressure to keep it down? Fifteen pounds to
Speaker 1: initially push it down. It's it's not it's not so
Speaker 1: it takes considerable a bit of force to push it
Speaker 1: down and then to maintain it. It's a notable, noticeable
Speaker 1: force because there is spring or air pressure trying to
Speaker 1: push it up. It's resisting the downward force that your
Speaker 1: hand is keeping on it. Basics overview, very basic of
Speaker 1: how controls work. I wonder how many te drivers like
Speaker 1: you know have had made themselves like a specially weighted
Speaker 1: glove to make it easier. I've heard it's hard to
Speaker 1: do that all day pressed down. I don't think they
Speaker 1: actually made especially way to glove, but as we'll talk
Speaker 1: about later on, they did figure out some tricks to
Speaker 1: make it much easier on themselves. I was going to
Speaker 1: lean on it. That is one way to do it,
Speaker 1: but it's it's it's a it's in a position that
Speaker 1: I think is awkward to lean on. You'd be moving
Speaker 1: back and forth. Because think about like this train in
Speaker 1: less than ten minutes, it made five stops. The longer trains,
Speaker 1: maybe a guy could get away with that. It went
Speaker 1: sorry and the arc went away from you, towards you,
Speaker 1: towards Yeah, so you're in the middle, and so you
Speaker 1: can if it was in the middle position, low gear,
Speaker 1: you could do that. Not so easy when it's in
Speaker 1: the nine o'clock position, which is the high gear, because
Speaker 1: you're going to rotate the train between low and high
Speaker 1: gear for speed based on what you're doing. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: guess the other thing that I'll just go ahead and
Speaker 1: mention right now is that I have an issue with
Speaker 1: the idea that he would have ever gotten into high gear.
Speaker 1: Given the shortness of this route, it's ten minutes. The
Speaker 1: trains accelerate quite quickly, and it's sounds to me like
Speaker 1: they come up to speed very fast and to be
Speaker 1: able to make those stuffs in that time, it sounds
Speaker 1: like you have to go from the six o'clock low
Speaker 1: gear to the nine o'clock position high gear quite frequently,
Speaker 1: because you're you're ramping the train up and then you're
Speaker 1: ramping it back. If you kept it in low gear,
Speaker 1: you would never be on time, is my understanding. I
Speaker 1: could be wrong, but if a stick was shutting it
Speaker 1: off and coasting all the way up, you can see
Speaker 1: what you want. To give it a little blast speed,
Speaker 1: he'd want to be a high gear and then knock
Speaker 1: it back to full neutral and just coast his way
Speaker 1: on in. So let's go with In the mechanical failure theory.
Speaker 1: The first theory is that there was a bad break valve.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna get into more descriptions of how stuff
Speaker 1: on these trains worked. And I apologize, well, that's tymably
Speaker 1: not true because they know the tube system that they
Speaker 1: said afterwards that they examined the whole brake system and
Speaker 1: it was just flawless. That is knock, that is not
Speaker 1: entirely act. You're at. Joey seem to believe that there
Speaker 1: was absolutely nothing mechanically wrong with that train at all.
Speaker 1: So that's what they said. I know, I know, I know,
Speaker 1: And to follow on what joe is getting at. That's
Speaker 1: the official inquest into the accident, which um what they did.
Speaker 1: The brakes on the train are electro pneumatic, which is
Speaker 1: a fancy way of saying they are air brakes that
Speaker 1: are electronically controlled, and that was actually one set of
Speaker 1: They had two sets of brakes on the train. Yes,
Speaker 1: there's the Westinghouse which is basically a kind of a
Speaker 1: heart brake system, and then the air brake system, the
Speaker 1: ep is it's referred to, so we're just gonna call
Speaker 1: it the air brakes for the moment. But the air
Speaker 1: brake system runs through the entire length of the train,
Speaker 1: and because it's an air system, it's very simple in theory.
Speaker 1: There's a tank that has pressure in it, and when
Speaker 1: the driver or a passenger pulls the right handle, the
Speaker 1: pressure pours into the tube system that controls the brakes
Speaker 1: and that pressure then activates the brakes, which would then
Speaker 1: compress on the wheels. So just like when you step
Speaker 1: on the brake in your car, if it was done
Speaker 1: by air. That's the simplest version of this, except it's
Speaker 1: an air system, so it has a bunch of valves
Speaker 1: in it to be able to turn things off to disconnected.
Speaker 1: And in the inquest, they noted that there was a
Speaker 1: couple of valves that were broken, and they presumed were
Speaker 1: broken because of the accident, because they say they took
Speaker 1: all of the lines off of the train and they
Speaker 1: reassembled them, and when they brought the system up to pressure,
Speaker 1: it came up to pressure. But it sounds like they
Speaker 1: also replaced the broken valves to do so. But I
Speaker 1: don't see anything that says that they actually tested those valves.
Speaker 1: So I wonder if there is a scenario where a
Speaker 1: valve goes bad it therefore dumps all the pressure in
Speaker 1: the tank. So think of an air compressor. If it's
Speaker 1: got no pressure in it and you you hit the button,
Speaker 1: nothing happens, And poor Nussen is sitting there driving the
Speaker 1: train and he's pulling on the lever and nothing is happening.
Speaker 1: It's a situation where I could see a guy just pulling,
Speaker 1: praying to God that the stupid thing will kick in,
Speaker 1: you know, like you only see it again in the
Speaker 1: movies when the brakes fail. Somebody's rapidly stomping on the
Speaker 1: brake pedal trying to get and he's doing the same
Speaker 1: thing with the brake handle, trying to get the sting
Speaker 1: to well, and I kind of wonder too, how you know,
Speaker 1: he must he should have known, but maybe he didn't
Speaker 1: know how far he had to go before the tunnel
Speaker 1: did ended he should know? Yeah, yeah, I mean my
Speaker 1: two problems with that are, like, there's got to be
Speaker 1: a backup auxiliary emergency system somewhere. It's called the Westinghouse, okay.
Speaker 1: And then the other one is it was reported that
Speaker 1: he coasted in to his stops, So why would he
Speaker 1: be going full throttle when he should have been easing
Speaker 1: off the throttle five minutes back. Well, and that's and
Speaker 1: that's a different theory. So that the passengers said that
Speaker 1: it felt like the and the witnesses said it looked
Speaker 1: like and felt like the train was accelerating, but it
Speaker 1: may have been up to speed and it could have
Speaker 1: been going thirty or forty miles and with no breaking
Speaker 1: just like, oh my god, craps flying by. Because you've
Speaker 1: been in a subway and you see things whizzing by,
Speaker 1: but it's dark and you don't really have a good
Speaker 1: impression of your speed. But suddenly when there's things for
Speaker 1: frame of reference, like, holy crap, we're speeding up. Oh wait, no,
Speaker 1: we're slowing down, like I could see the other side
Speaker 1: of the coin to what you're saying. Sure, I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know that that's the other side of the
Speaker 1: coin to what I'm saying. But maybe you're saying why
Speaker 1: was the train speeding up? No, I'm just saying why
Speaker 1: was it going that fast at all? If he was
Speaker 1: known to coast in, he should have eased up on
Speaker 1: the throttle all like, much earlier. And if the breaking
Speaker 1: sist is not working, he still should be slowing down
Speaker 1: because he's coasting in because he's not hitting the throttle anymore.
Speaker 1: And they all he needed to do is let go,
Speaker 1: let go. Yeah. True in theory. So that's that's what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, is like, that's the big problem I have
Speaker 1: with that is that it sounds like he wasn't a
Speaker 1: big user of the brakes anyway. So why was he
Speaker 1: going thirty forty miles an hour when he hit that
Speaker 1: station when he should have been coasting in By all
Speaker 1: reports of the way, he should tread off the power
Speaker 1: much earlier. Yeah, and then it wasn't just bad breaks, obviously,
Speaker 1: something else have been going on. Maybe didn't work either.
Speaker 1: The breaks theoretically should have been able to stop it,
Speaker 1: no matter what theoretically they should have And and so
Speaker 1: we haven't talked about this, but these trains officially got
Speaker 1: examined for maintenance reasons on quite a rigorous schedule. This
Speaker 1: is officially speaking. They were looked at once a week
Speaker 1: I think it was basically once a quarter, and then
Speaker 1: they were Any major overhaul work was done once a year.
Speaker 1: And according to the records, this train was spotless. It
Speaker 1: had gone through its weekly review the night before the accident.
Speaker 1: Although there were accusations of falsifications, we talked about that.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, because that's what is the name of
Speaker 1: the guy that you that. There's a guy named Anthony Bright.
Speaker 1: He used to work for the Tube System and he's
Speaker 1: he's posted a lot of interesting stuff on the web
Speaker 1: about He's been a lot of accusations. I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: I was just gonna go ahead and preface this by
Speaker 1: saying anything that was commissioned in nineteen thirty eight, right,
Speaker 1: that's when this train was commissioned, the train was constructed. Yeah. Actually,
Speaker 1: I don't know that this is an individual one. That's
Speaker 1: when they first started. It was, he was, but that
Speaker 1: at least, you know, thirty years old, it's not going
Speaker 1: to be spotless no matter what, there's gonna be some
Speaker 1: opponents would have been replaced on a regular basis, engines
Speaker 1: and brakes and wheels and stuff like. I'm just eating
Speaker 1: the interior as were replaced. I'm just casting aspersions on
Speaker 1: the fact that it was quote unquote spotless. There's gonna
Speaker 1: be minor things that needed to have happened. So I
Speaker 1: guess what I what I mean when I say spotless
Speaker 1: is there's always a lemon in the bunch. There's always
Speaker 1: that one car number fifty two. Look fifty two broke
Speaker 1: down again. Big shocker there. That kind of when I
Speaker 1: say that it's it was a regular train. It didn't
Speaker 1: have any major issues. It got its maintenance officially speaking,
Speaker 1: and it didn't have any problems. But the accusations that
Speaker 1: that Joe found in the comments section that I didn't
Speaker 1: go into, say quite the different story. Uh yeah, now
Speaker 1: he uh, he said a lot of the maintenance staff
Speaker 1: at East and I guess that's where they did the maintenance.
Speaker 1: He said, they were stealing the batteries, stealing the mercury
Speaker 1: from these retarders that we're part of the breaking system.
Speaker 1: Basically anything else, as he says, they could sell to
Speaker 1: the scrappy. To quote him, so, I said, instead of
Speaker 1: maintaining the trains, they were spending their worktime stealing from
Speaker 1: the trains. He also makes the accusation which I find
Speaker 1: interesting because this goes into the next theory, which is
Speaker 1: I call it the engine theory. One of the things
Speaker 1: he says is he says that these cars were coupled
Speaker 1: together in threes. So there were three cars. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: so three cars locked together, then another three cars connected
Speaker 1: to that. That's how we have the first three cars
Speaker 1: and the rear three cars. And according to him, you
Speaker 1: could only drive on the head and the tail or
Speaker 1: from the head and the tail of that three car system.
Speaker 1: Even though these cars were technically designed so that any
Speaker 1: of those three cars could be the head or tail
Speaker 1: of a group. Because of mechanical issues, they had permanently
Speaker 1: coupled them together so they could scavenge the controls from
Speaker 1: the middle car and the interior of the front rear
Speaker 1: car to have stuff for the prints because there were
Speaker 1: some mechanical issues with the actual driver level system. According
Speaker 1: to him, Yeah, no, he said that they were worn
Speaker 1: out and they needed to be replaced, and so they
Speaker 1: basically just they scavenged apart from the train and uh
Speaker 1: and he also said as far as the brooke and
Speaker 1: valve there he goes, he says, there could have been
Speaker 1: it could have been like a loose or a defective valve.
Speaker 1: They said. Also, the valves are throughout the train. He said,
Speaker 1: somebody opening a valve deliberately or inadvertently could also sabotage
Speaker 1: the brake system, whether somebody meant to or not being
Speaker 1: a prankster or just realizing they were causing a mistake
Speaker 1: or deliberate sabotage. So that that brings you know what,
Speaker 1: So I hadn't thought about that until just now. But
Speaker 1: you remember we talked about the eighteen year old kid
Speaker 1: who was the guard on the train. One of the
Speaker 1: things he told the inquest when they said, you know
Speaker 1: something about why didn't you pull the handle and initiate
Speaker 1: the Westinghouse brakes and stop the train. Is he said, Well,
Speaker 1: he had gone to the other into the train and
Speaker 1: was rooting around looking for newspapers to read because obviously
Speaker 1: it was boring. And then he was reading the paper
Speaker 1: not paying attention. That's why he didn't pull the brake handle.
Speaker 1: But what I'm getting at here is if the trains
Speaker 1: are in the tail section cab and he is rooting around,
Speaker 1: it's possible he could have knocked a valve. It could
Speaker 1: have accidentally done it too, or he could I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not blaming this kid at all, but
Speaker 1: it just suddenly that dawned on me from that that
Speaker 1: stuff that you're looking at right there. Yeah, And if
Speaker 1: he had actually, you know, if he had actually understood
Speaker 1: the operation of it when apparently, according to an Anthony Brake,
Speaker 1: if a failure of the electro pneumatic system, what that happened.
Speaker 1: What that causes is a discharge of air from the
Speaker 1: system into the driver's cab, which he said could be
Speaker 1: unpleasant because it's like not just air, but it has
Speaker 1: like its gonna have dust and oil, oil oil droplets
Speaker 1: and things like that, and so it could have been
Speaker 1: either a spiteful prank, because I had heard that the
Speaker 1: two of them, the Harrison and Newson, didn't necessarily get
Speaker 1: along that well, which is funny because a lot of
Speaker 1: the times it's referred to as they had an okay
Speaker 1: working relationship, they just were massively different in ages. So
Speaker 1: or yeah, or it could have been attended it's kind
Speaker 1: of a fun little prank. Yeah, he's get this little
Speaker 1: blast of this little cab with all this crap, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and maybe so it could have been inadvertence. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's possible right that there was that it
Speaker 1: was intended as this. He understood that you would get
Speaker 1: like the blast of air in the cab. He didn't
Speaker 1: understand that while you give that blast of air in
Speaker 1: the cab, you functionally just decimate the brake system the
Speaker 1: pressure therefore the brakes. I mean, so that's certainly possible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but of course that doesn't account for the continued even
Speaker 1: if the train wasn't accelerating into the station, if it
Speaker 1: was still going the same speed, the lack of brakes
Speaker 1: doesn't really account for that. So there's there's Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: part of the theory of the engines. That I'm looking at.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I was looking at was
Speaker 1: the possibility of the fact that the the speed lever
Speaker 1: was actually stuck in the nine o'clock position because the
Speaker 1: drive shaft, and I'm presuming that they are referring to
Speaker 1: the drive shaft of that lever itself was broken. And
Speaker 1: they said, well, we think that that's broken because of
Speaker 1: the impact of the train into the end of the tunnel,
Speaker 1: which is logical, I admit this, but I also wonder
Speaker 1: if it is a scenario where it is a weekend
Speaker 1: drive shaft of that lever and he puts it into
Speaker 1: high and it's the control rods snaps internally that that
Speaker 1: and suddenly the lever useless. Have you seen what the
Speaker 1: housing for that lever looks like? Not? So it is
Speaker 1: a giant metal box, the main the main column. So
Speaker 1: there's the lever, and does it have like a you
Speaker 1: push it down and there's a gap in between, like
Speaker 1: there is a gap? Yes, Okay, So I'm formulating my
Speaker 1: new theory that that you know, well, prankster McGhee over here,
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, this will be fun. There will be
Speaker 1: like a little blast of air, but there's particular and
Speaker 1: in that particular is a little stone that gets blown
Speaker 1: up and kicked up into the crevice between the lever
Speaker 1: and the housing, which functionally jams the throttle. And that
Speaker 1: could have happened pretty easily when that X we're talking
Speaker 1: about that train X where it like jumps, that something
Speaker 1: could have popped up in there. Basically just jams that
Speaker 1: lever into full throttle position. Would be an amazing coincidence
Speaker 1: because there's not so yeah, but I mean so to
Speaker 1: jam it, whatever detritus you're you're you're making up in
Speaker 1: this scenario would have to come onto. So if the
Speaker 1: levers in the nine o'clock position, you would have to
Speaker 1: jam from the three o'clock side to keep the lever
Speaker 1: pushed down and in that position. Couldn't have just been
Speaker 1: in the couldn't be. It couldn't have been in under
Speaker 1: the gap between the nine o'clock position and the center
Speaker 1: of the clock position because the lever raises up, so
Speaker 1: it could have been in the backside. But one thing
Speaker 1: that I did find interesting in the stuff that Joe
Speaker 1: had earlier that may account for this is that if
Speaker 1: there's something wrong with the control, Newson could have very
Speaker 1: well just said okay, you know, it's screwed. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: I'm gonna pull pressure off and let the dead man
Speaker 1: switch go. Except according to this guy's information about the
Speaker 1: maintenance systems, it was notorious for that. Some of those
Speaker 1: two are not notorious, but some of those tubes would
Speaker 1: corrode because it's air, and air systems are notorious for
Speaker 1: having water in them condensation. So it england and it
Speaker 1: gets crowd in it and its seals and suddenly there's
Speaker 1: a the pressure that should be released from the pushing
Speaker 1: down of the lever or the letting go of it
Speaker 1: is maintained by whatever crud is in the line has
Speaker 1: fused it shut. So there's that also possibility that's more
Speaker 1: of the brakes fail side. But there's a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff in this. I mean, it's just it's such a
Speaker 1: complicated machine. Yeah it is. Yeah, they're more complicated than
Speaker 1: they think. And I and I do find the poor
Speaker 1: maidenance theory to be at least a little bit compelling. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's super compelling. It also, you know, gives
Speaker 1: there's a good reason for the inquest to have covered
Speaker 1: it up, right. You don't want mass hysteria of people
Speaker 1: suddenly thinking oh my god, the public transportation system is
Speaker 1: no longer safe. Some some hedge are going to roll right.
Speaker 1: It's really easy to just say this guy he died
Speaker 1: is responsible. Passed the buck onto a dude who has
Speaker 1: already paid the ultimate sacrifice. Really, you know, you're not
Speaker 1: really slandering that much of his life. I presume that
Speaker 1: his widow still got her you know, pension checks and
Speaker 1: all of that stuff. So to me, it makes perfect
Speaker 1: sense that there was some huge maintenance error and there
Speaker 1: was like a large cover up. Just from a conspiracy standpoint,
Speaker 1: that's that that makes sense. And the guys on the
Speaker 1: platform who witnessed him standing there staring straight ahead, there
Speaker 1: were how many I think there's there's at least half
Speaker 1: dozen statements there that many people really yeah, people, well
Speaker 1: people were waiting to catch the train to go the
Speaker 1: other direction. Yeah, but we wasn't. One of them was
Speaker 1: an employee. I think there's something in that thing that
Speaker 1: you had that said most of the eyewitness reports were
Speaker 1: actually given by people who were employed by the Underground.
Speaker 1: Well exactly, there were members of the trade union in
Speaker 1: the Underground, and so because there's guys that work there,
Speaker 1: there's guys that made that you know, there's guards and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. So there is so these were guys
Speaker 1: who maybe went along with the whole thing because you know,
Speaker 1: they were probably told by their bosses that, hey, you'll
Speaker 1: be rewarded for you know, just saying that you saw this,
Speaker 1: and they probably all those guys probably saw nothing. And
Speaker 1: there there is stuff that says that I can't gosh,
Speaker 1: I wish I had his name. I think it was
Speaker 1: the guard he was, Yeah, it was the guard I
Speaker 1: think was immediately taken by the police to the police
Speaker 1: station and question and then taken for a walk like
Speaker 1: there's some senior old Harris. Right. Yeah, there's some hinky
Speaker 1: conspiracy level stuff that you're like, whoa, Well, that doesn't
Speaker 1: doesn't make a lick of sense. And the thing about
Speaker 1: it is is when you got this smoothed up train,
Speaker 1: that's just literally I just twisted up piece of wreckage.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be really hard to prove mechanical failure. Although
Speaker 1: I gotta tell you people reconstruct crashed airplanes and they
Speaker 1: figured stuff out. That's true. Well here's the thing though.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing though, is that if you can let's suppose,
Speaker 1: for example, you're one of the head of say, the
Speaker 1: trade unions, and you're also you know, part of the
Speaker 1: transportation thing in the labor party. So this is your gig,
Speaker 1: your responsibility. Now, do you really want a detailed inquiry
Speaker 1: into what's really going on with all these maintenance issues
Speaker 1: and people stripping the trains and stealing craft? Do you
Speaker 1: really want that? Or do you want or do you
Speaker 1: want to put this issue to rest as quickly as
Speaker 1: you possibly can, which they did, Yeah, they sure did.
Speaker 1: Two days. I think it took me. Yeah, the in
Speaker 1: quest actually was four days including lunch breaks, which yeah,
Speaker 1: which which by the way, today would be you know,
Speaker 1: how long would it take? Eights? And well no, that's
Speaker 1: eight sixteen thirty two hours is the amount of time
Speaker 1: that it took to compile everything in sessions, where for
Speaker 1: today those investigations take one to three years. But yeah,
Speaker 1: the but know, that's the thing about it. To me,
Speaker 1: it was the whole by by getting it right out
Speaker 1: there right away. Oh saw the driver, he was just
Speaker 1: standing there staring straight ahead. Obviously he did it, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean that just that just obvious the need for
Speaker 1: any sort of strict inquiry into what was really going on.
Speaker 1: This guy obviously scurred up, is what they're saying. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so yeah, and that headed off a lot of unpleasantness,
Speaker 1: a lot of unpleasantness for a lot of people. Yeah, No, no,
Speaker 1: you're you're absolutely right. It's not that crazy of a
Speaker 1: conspiracy theory. No, it's not, it's not. But I did
Speaker 1: I did read one other thing that made me wonder,
Speaker 1: maybe to a degree, if this they were right and
Speaker 1: it was operator error. And that's our final theory, which
Speaker 1: is that he made a massive mistake. So if we
Speaker 1: go back to controls of the train, we talked about
Speaker 1: how much pressure it takes to you know, to push
Speaker 1: it down from three o'clock and then once it's in
Speaker 1: the six o'clock position, you know a little bit of
Speaker 1: pressure to keep it down, but then to go to
Speaker 1: the nine o'clock position and to keep pressure downward, pressure
Speaker 1: on it is not easy because that's a straight arm thing.
Speaker 1: Let's say he's not doing what you suggested, which is
Speaker 1: leaning on it. Well, I'm I'm envisioning leaning on at
Speaker 1: six right, at nine, it would be hard. Well, at
Speaker 1: six o'clock it's right in front of you. Put your
Speaker 1: arms straight down on right right. Okay, So let's let's
Speaker 1: go back to the engines, and briefly I talked about
Speaker 1: they had a low gear and kind of a high
Speaker 1: gear scenario, so the electric engines, just to get the
Speaker 1: details covered they had. This is from I'm not an
Speaker 1: electrical engineer, so please nobody, you know, just put me
Speaker 1: on the spit for this. But actually that their motors
Speaker 1: not engines. Not just if you don't want people like
Speaker 1: you know, making fun of or for Joe to put
Speaker 1: me on the engine the thing because I called it
Speaker 1: a an engine instead of a motor, or it's a
Speaker 1: motor not an engine, or the other way around exactly. Okay,
Speaker 1: So the point is is that for it from electrical perspective,
Speaker 1: they had what they referred to as full series, which
Speaker 1: was the low gear, and then there was par full parallel,
Speaker 1: which was the high gear the nine o'clock position. Well,
Speaker 1: there was an interesting little catch in the whole system,
Speaker 1: which is that once the control was at that nine
Speaker 1: o'clock full parallel position the high gear, the driver could
Speaker 1: pull the handle back to the six o'clock position, and
Speaker 1: as long as nothing interrupted to the speed of the train,
Speaker 1: it would stay in high gear. So even though it
Speaker 1: should be transitioning down the low gear, unless the driver
Speaker 1: moved it back towards three o'clock to disengage the motors
Speaker 1: and reset it, it would stay in high gear. So
Speaker 1: what kind of kind of like neutralized as a whole
Speaker 1: dead man switched thing up. Well, it does to a
Speaker 1: degree because now it's well, drivers did it all the
Speaker 1: time because it's much you you cycle up, you get
Speaker 1: to speed, and then you pull it back to the
Speaker 1: six o'clock from nine to six, and you put your
Speaker 1: elbow on it, lean on it right, because it's much
Speaker 1: easier to hold at six o'clock than the nine o'clock position. Well,
Speaker 1: I wondered, because about a week prior to the this
Speaker 1: whole thing, and I think it was the Monday of
Speaker 1: that week, or maybe the monday before, he was reported
Speaker 1: to have missed a stop by several cars. He didn't
Speaker 1: stop in time, and he hadn't been on the job
Speaker 1: but a year, and doesn't sound like he was doing
Speaker 1: any of the major lines. But if the experienced guys
Speaker 1: are doing this and somebody says, oh, hey, Newson, here's dude,
Speaker 1: here's a trick. This will make so you're not keeping
Speaker 1: your arm locked out, your shoulders not gonna hurt YadA
Speaker 1: YadA YadA. Tells him how to do it, but he
Speaker 1: doesn't get exactly how the motors and the pattern works.
Speaker 1: So he thinks, okay, I pulled it into the six
Speaker 1: o'clock position. We're going, and he thinks the processes he
Speaker 1: has to have go from nine to six to three
Speaker 1: to disengage the motor incorrectly rather than just kicking it
Speaker 1: over to the compremately. He just has the timing wrong.
Speaker 1: He has something about the or the operation of that
Speaker 1: that little trick wrong. He could have stopped late that
Speaker 1: time a week ago and then said, well let me
Speaker 1: give it a try again, and accidentally put it, you know,
Speaker 1: not understanding put it into high gear and kept it
Speaker 1: into high gear when he thought that he was shifting
Speaker 1: it into low or just something broke off inside. Well, yeah, again,
Speaker 1: that's at the mechanical level. I just looked at this
Speaker 1: and thought, well, this is this is behavior that drivers
Speaker 1: did to operate. I wonder if a guy not knowing
Speaker 1: the right way to do that trick could completely screw
Speaker 1: it up. I have simple trial, especially when you have
Speaker 1: a break right there. You know that's true, except I
Speaker 1: see people driving down the street. The simple thing is
Speaker 1: you make a turn and if your turn signal doesn't
Speaker 1: turn off, you turn your turn signal off. Yet I
Speaker 1: see people driving down the freeway for fifteen minutes with
Speaker 1: their damn turn signal. That's a simple thing, but doesn't
Speaker 1: mean people do it right. I recently found out that
Speaker 1: newer cars often don't have a sound associated with blinkers. Really, yeah,
Speaker 1: so that explains why people are not doing that, because
Speaker 1: they don't know that they're blinkers only for cars that are,
Speaker 1: you know, two or three years old, not for the
Speaker 1: last sixty years of history. I know that. For me,
Speaker 1: it's something about my my particular hype. The my steering
Speaker 1: wheel always blocks the turn signal indicator. You can adjust that, yeah,
Speaker 1: but yeah, but I haven't. But and and so I do.
Speaker 1: I found myself doing that sometimes if I'm on the
Speaker 1: freeway because I'm getting so much freeway now as I
Speaker 1: can't hear it, you know, and I can't see it
Speaker 1: because the steering wheels blocking it. So I just like,
Speaker 1: so I just think back to the theory. The point
Speaker 1: is that I think that there may have been he
Speaker 1: may have screwed up in trying to do something with
Speaker 1: the control. I don't know if this is something wrong
Speaker 1: with me or like what, But I'm way more prone
Speaker 1: to believe that there's like wide systematic problems with steelings
Speaker 1: that people wanted to keep quiet about, Yeah, than like
Speaker 1: one dude who seems like a wholesome guy making a
Speaker 1: big mistake like that. I think I would think that
Speaker 1: if it were me and I was heading to the
Speaker 1: end of the line and a dead end, and not
Speaker 1: by the dead end we made solid wall brick wall,
Speaker 1: I would be more inclined to use, you know, the
Speaker 1: balls out thing earlier in the line and then say
Speaker 1: and be a little more conservative as my in my
Speaker 1: approach to the final station at the end of the line. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess I I agree, I wouldn't be trying out
Speaker 1: that new thing. What I understand, it sounds like Newson
Speaker 1: was working the short run a lot, so maybe he
Speaker 1: had been told that he was going to give the
Speaker 1: opportunity to work one of the longer lines, and he
Speaker 1: wanted to figure this thing out before he was on
Speaker 1: the longer line, and it was a bad idea. Again,
Speaker 1: I don't think that's what it is. But because I
Speaker 1: read about that driving habit, it always it piques my
Speaker 1: interest and I have to ask, I always have to
Speaker 1: ask the question. I still it seems like even if
Speaker 1: he's sort of forgotten the whole thing, he still would
Speaker 1: have figured it out before the end, you would think, so, yeah,
Speaker 1: which it makes me inclined to believe that either something
Speaker 1: was wrong with the drive system or something was wrong
Speaker 1: with brakes. The weird thing about the drive system is
Speaker 1: you remember how I talked about the motors engines or
Speaker 1: motors motors? Okay, the motors. They have the full parallel
Speaker 1: and the high gear and the low gear full parallel series.
Speaker 1: Don't ask me, Joe, no, no, I know what they mean.
Speaker 1: But the question is are we talking about more than
Speaker 1: one motor or more than one battery or both? I
Speaker 1: don't ask me. What I want to talk about is
Speaker 1: the fact that when the wheels of the train disconnected
Speaker 1: from the track, it reset the motor to whatever the
Speaker 1: current setting of the drive control is. So, for example,
Speaker 1: if it's in high gear, or it thinks it's in
Speaker 1: high gear, but the drivers put it in low and
Speaker 1: it runs across that X, the motor disconnects from the
Speaker 1: system momentarily as it goes over the as gaps, which
Speaker 1: would drop it into low gear because that's why that's
Speaker 1: receiving electrical input from Yes, yes, which makes me what
Speaker 1: makes me not quite a hundred percent sure that I
Speaker 1: believe that there was a breakage or a lock up
Speaker 1: in the dry control system, and more inclined to think
Speaker 1: that maybe there was something wrong with the breaking system. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know either. I think we've
Speaker 1: gotta need to take a trip to London. I think
Speaker 1: they have one of these things in museum and we
Speaker 1: could take it apart. We just go to the Isle
Speaker 1: of Wight. Yeah, we're running around on the Isle of Wight. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're even up above ground, so we don't even have
Speaker 1: to get you know, dirty in the tunnel in coral
Speaker 1: around and look at this. I'll do it. Yeah, alright, Okay,
Speaker 1: well we've we've exhausted this one. Yeah, I'm gonna go.
Speaker 1: But yeah, final theory, I'm gonna go for the conspiracy
Speaker 1: to just hush hush up a lot of mouthfeasance. I agree,
Speaker 1: it's malfeasance for malfeasance's sake, malfeasance all around it. Okay,
Speaker 1: so well, if you want to read any of the
Speaker 1: material that we have, we will be putting at least
Speaker 1: some of the links up on our website. The website
Speaker 1: is of course Thinking Sideways podcast dot com. You can
Speaker 1: look through all of our episodes. We have an episode
Speaker 1: list available as an individual page, so you can search
Speaker 1: through their fine stories you want. We also have other
Speaker 1: stuff on the website such as merchandise, so through Zazzle
Speaker 1: and red Bubble we have shirts and mugs and all
Speaker 1: kinds of different things available stickers, so go through that
Speaker 1: and look through those. We will of course have this
Speaker 1: episode on all of the streaming services, so if you're
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Speaker 1: the back catalog. Were of course also on iTunes, which
Speaker 1: is where a lot of folks find us. If you're
Speaker 1: on iTunes, your your user of iTunes, do take the
Speaker 1: time to leave a comment and a rating. That does
Speaker 1: help us out and then helps other folks find the show,
Speaker 1: which is the most important thing. We are on all
Speaker 1: of the social media, so we're on Twitter at Think
Speaker 1: in Sideways without the G in the middle. We were
Speaker 1: on Facebook with Facebook group and Facebook page, so like
Speaker 1: the page, joined the group. Lots of fun conversations constantly
Speaker 1: going on about in there, and you've got questions, you've
Speaker 1: got concerns, you disagree with the theory, or you have
Speaker 1: a theory of your own, feel free to let us know.
Speaker 1: You can send us an email. Our email address is
Speaker 1: Thinking Sideways podcast at gmail dot com. And we're still
Speaker 1: replying to every email. We're getting slower about it, but
Speaker 1: we're still replying to every email that comes through. Sometimes
Speaker 1: it takes a couple of days or something. So I
Speaker 1: guess with that, I'm gonna motor on out of here
Speaker 1: for me. Yeah, I'm just gonna say, man,