Speaker 1: Thinking Sideways is not brought to you by catch hot
Speaker 1: tofoon vice. Instead is supported by the generous contributions of
Speaker 1: people like you, our listeners on Patreon. Visit patreon dot
Speaker 1: com slash thinking sideways to learn more Thinking Sideways. I
Speaker 1: don't understand. I'm you never know stories of things we
Speaker 1: simply don't know the answer too. Hey there, and welcome
Speaker 1: to another episode of Thinking Sideways. What you have to understand? No,
Speaker 1: I'll be back to Thinking sideways. Okay. I am Steve,
Speaker 1: as always joined by Devin and Joe, and today we
Speaker 1: have yet another mystery to talk about. I'm really agreely mystery.
Speaker 1: Ye does it involve my favorite thing? One of them?
Speaker 1: One of my favorite things? One of them? I do
Speaker 1: have a lot of favorite things that you do. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Today we're going to talk about the Sunset Limited derailment
Speaker 1: that happened in and not correct. Actually it did go
Speaker 1: off its rails. Well yeah, but it didn't. It didn't
Speaker 1: like different reasons anyway. Anyway, you guys done. Yeah, before
Speaker 1: we get off track again or get in too far
Speaker 1: into the story, Yeah, I do want to say that
Speaker 1: this was a listener suggestion from Katie, so thank you Katie.
Speaker 1: Really like this, um, so let's go ahead and do this.
Speaker 1: The the Sunset Limited, which is an Amtrak passenger train,
Speaker 1: derailed in the middle of the Arizona Desert, which, by
Speaker 1: the way, I'm kind of working on a travel disaster series,
Speaker 1: it appears, and I'm really just trying to scare the
Speaker 1: crap out of people so that they have a reason
Speaker 1: to stay home because traveling is scary. You do last
Speaker 1: time the airline crash the South African Airlines. Actually, yeah,
Speaker 1: I was researching this. I found a list online of
Speaker 1: all these various train crashes. It's like, you know, the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century out to the present day. Some really amazing.
Speaker 1: The problem with discouraging our listeners from traveling is that
Speaker 1: many of them listen while traveling. So our listeners, our
Speaker 1: listenership may decrease a little bit. Okay, fine, as I
Speaker 1: always do, at the end of this, I'll give your
Speaker 1: reassurances why it can't happen anymore, why you're safe. It'll
Speaker 1: be okay, all right, it'll be okay, good because I
Speaker 1: just got back from a train trip. So alrighty well,
Speaker 1: let's let's start our mystery. The name Sunset Limited is
Speaker 1: actually quite an old name it was used before the
Speaker 1: turn of the twentieth century. Actually, at that time or
Speaker 1: for a short time, Southern Pacific Railroad was running it
Speaker 1: under the name of Sunset Express. So the whole thing
Speaker 1: originally was if you just caught That was run by
Speaker 1: Southern Pacific Railroad, which was a huge rail line that
Speaker 1: ran all over the United States. They were huge and beautiful,
Speaker 1: and some of their trains were beautiful trains. A lot,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. The Sunset Limited was a passenger train, and
Speaker 1: it was kind of a premier luxury train. It had
Speaker 1: bar cars, it had sleeping cars, and it had just
Speaker 1: about every other car that was needed to make it's
Speaker 1: kind of well to do clientele happy. Sounds like, actually, yeah,
Speaker 1: it really was. Now today the Sunset Limited runs from
Speaker 1: New Orleans to San Francisco because it takes a bend
Speaker 1: at Los Angeles and heads north. But prior to that
Speaker 1: it used to run from I believe it was Orlando. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it doesn't do that anymore because after Hurricane Katrina the
Speaker 1: tracks are sort of no good. I don't think I
Speaker 1: don't think it goes to San Francisco anymore, either, doesn't. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure that that's all on the I was
Speaker 1: pulling up the root information and I'm almost positive that
Speaker 1: it's still going there. That's kind of where it does
Speaker 1: it's big turn. Well, yeah it doesn't. You can always
Speaker 1: catch a plane in l a um. Now, the Sunset
Speaker 1: Limited was great, It was fantastic, and it just kept
Speaker 1: getting bigger and bigger. But of course the American rail
Speaker 1: system started to go into decline and it couldn't escape
Speaker 1: that general decline, so it started to go downhill and
Speaker 1: at its lowest point, this is actually where it's probably
Speaker 1: one of the saddest things about this train is at
Speaker 1: its lowest point, the Sunset Limited was one engine, a
Speaker 1: baggage car, a coach car, and an automat car, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, an automatic is just a bunch of
Speaker 1: vending mission foods and tables, right, I mean, yeah, you
Speaker 1: could sit down, but yeah. And the reason that it
Speaker 1: had to have the automat is because the trip is
Speaker 1: so long that it took you had to give people food.
Speaker 1: Otherwise the automat would have never been there. They would
Speaker 1: have saved the weight in the space if they could have.
Speaker 1: Could you buy a beer out of machine too? I
Speaker 1: don't know, probably not, probably not. It would have been
Speaker 1: really foamy. Yeah maybe, although it was like the fifties
Speaker 1: and sixties, right, so who knows. Yeah, yeah, pull the
Speaker 1: Martini lever. They had whiskey vending machines. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think they were mostly novelty, but that was a thing
Speaker 1: I like the idea. Yeah, me too, Okay, okay, So
Speaker 1: it's uh so, like I said, Sunset Limited starts at
Speaker 1: the in the early end of the twentieth century. Now
Speaker 1: we're going to move to The rail system is in
Speaker 1: decline in general in the United States. Passenger rail I mean,
Speaker 1: I think passenger rails still doing all right. It is
Speaker 1: still doing all right. It's not it's not what it
Speaker 1: was at one time, but it's still doing well. It's alive.
Speaker 1: That year one is when Amtrak took over the rail
Speaker 1: lines for passenger trains. For those of you who don't know,
Speaker 1: Amtrak is the name that is used for the National
Speaker 1: Railroad Passenger Corporation, which is a US government funded company.
Speaker 1: It's not technically completely private, subsidized, I think is the
Speaker 1: right way to say it, and it's a it's a
Speaker 1: government sponsored consolidation of most of the passenger rails in
Speaker 1: the US. And if you actually look at the name
Speaker 1: Amtrack American Tracks literally where they got the name. Get it,
Speaker 1: I got it. The Sunset Limited, of course, is a
Speaker 1: passenger train under Amtrack. So Amtrak does their due diligence,
Speaker 1: and as with most of the lines that they run,
Speaker 1: they managed to grow it and it's gotten bigger, and yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there's something to be said. I think that
Speaker 1: kind of luxury passenger trains ended up being really really
Speaker 1: expensive and not really worth the time. That's the that's
Speaker 1: was just like for that amount, I can take a
Speaker 1: three hour flight and the nostalgia of it wasn't there
Speaker 1: yet where it is now so amtrack or even a drive, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean from here we're in Portland to go to Seattle,
Speaker 1: I think it's a five or six hour train ride.
Speaker 1: Three and a half hours? Is it to get from
Speaker 1: Portland to Seattle? Does it take so long because you
Speaker 1: stop everywhere and you can drive. You can drive in
Speaker 1: the same amount of time. Yeah, And it's equaling costs
Speaker 1: to a rental car because that family will fly into
Speaker 1: Seattle and then drive down in rental all the time. Like,
Speaker 1: where does you take the train? Oh, never mind, it's
Speaker 1: actually more expensive. We just went up to Seattle. On
Speaker 1: the train a weekend ago, and there it's long and expensive,
Speaker 1: but there's some nostalgia with it right now, but there
Speaker 1: it wasn't. So when Amtrak took over, they lowered the
Speaker 1: rates and kind of made it more of an economy thing,
Speaker 1: and people really back on that. So that's that's kind
Speaker 1: of when it's affordable, why not I can sit here
Speaker 1: and relax and do what I want today. The line
Speaker 1: that the Sunset Limited runs is it's a route that
Speaker 1: it runs three times a week east to west and
Speaker 1: west to east, so three times a week in one
Speaker 1: direction and then three times a week in the other direction.
Speaker 1: And it runs the course over two days is approximately
Speaker 1: two thousand miles, which for folks on the metric system,
Speaker 1: that's and in the train had grown again. It was
Speaker 1: big enough that it required two engines and it had
Speaker 1: about a dozen cars. So we're gonna move to the
Speaker 1: day in question. Well, that's where we're headed. The day
Speaker 1: in question that we're going to talk about is the
Speaker 1: wee hours of the morning of October nine. The train
Speaker 1: is at this point heading westbound, so from New Orleans,
Speaker 1: heading towards San Francisco. The train derailed just before crossing
Speaker 1: a trestle, And if you don't know, trestle is a
Speaker 1: bridge for a rail. They're smaller. Yes. Even though so
Speaker 1: the train is derailed, it's got enough inertia behind it.
Speaker 1: And this is the thing about train crashes that make
Speaker 1: them so sometimes seriously deadly. It had so much inertia
Speaker 1: behind it that the engines, even though they were knocked
Speaker 1: off of the rail, traveled across the bridge, and the
Speaker 1: next two cars went across the trestle, and then after
Speaker 1: that the rest of the cars actually fell off of
Speaker 1: the bridge. The passengers reported feeling a giant jolt like
Speaker 1: you would and then the world started spinning. No pun intended.
Speaker 1: So the train, like I said, we get the engines
Speaker 1: come off, the first two cars come off, as the
Speaker 1: next cars start fall over, the whole thing jack knives.
Speaker 1: And the way trains are connected now in the nineties,
Speaker 1: that's what I do. When I say now, I mean
Speaker 1: in the nineties. And all of the cars are connected,
Speaker 1: and the connections are snug enough that they can't roll
Speaker 1: too much independent of one another, so they're all locked together,
Speaker 1: kind of like the links in a chain, so as
Speaker 1: you spin it, all of them roll. And that's one
Speaker 1: of the things that actually kept us from being a
Speaker 1: much more deadly incident is that it pulled all of
Speaker 1: them over and it absorbed some of the force of
Speaker 1: the crash because it fall down into the ravine. One
Speaker 1: car couldn't just you know, topple over and over and
Speaker 1: over in just the whole thing kind of doing one
Speaker 1: slow roll wasn't. Yeah. I was reading about that then
Speaker 1: earlier train wreck and the description of one of these
Speaker 1: guys that was I think he was in the bar
Speaker 1: car or something, and he said, you know, you put
Speaker 1: dice in the cup and you shake the cup, and
Speaker 1: he pumped the dice. He said he felt like he
Speaker 1: felt like that. Yeah, I felt like it was a yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: If if anybody has played with model trains, I played
Speaker 1: with model trains all the time as a kid. You
Speaker 1: know exactly what's going on here is that, you know
Speaker 1: model trains, it's hard to get them to go with
Speaker 1: enough speed. So when you knock one off, the next
Speaker 1: couple kind of fall over, but they don't just go tumbly.
Speaker 1: Now imagine that they were going ten times as fast
Speaker 1: and the cars were flying everywhere. That's what old trains
Speaker 1: used to have happened. But like I said, the train
Speaker 1: cars because they're stuck together, prevents a lot of human
Speaker 1: loss of life. They kind of just toppled. Yeah, one
Speaker 1: person died, the man by the name of Mitchell Bates.
Speaker 1: He was an Amtrak employee. He's been but amtrack for
Speaker 1: like twenty plus years, and he was on the train
Speaker 1: as an employee. Correct he was he was working, so
Speaker 1: one assumes he was standing and he was probably walking
Speaker 1: around at one thirty in the morning doing his rounds.
Speaker 1: He could have even been in between cars or something something,
Speaker 1: But he was the only person that was killed when
Speaker 1: the train fell off the trustle. And by the way,
Speaker 1: just to give you a frame of reference, it fell
Speaker 1: thirty feet, which is equivalent to about nine meters, so
Speaker 1: it's a long way down. Although it's how wide was it?
Speaker 1: Do you remember? It wasn't wider than the car was
Speaker 1: long right the ravine it was it was, it was
Speaker 1: longer it was the ravine. The with the ravine was
Speaker 1: more than the length of a car, but it was
Speaker 1: like two cars at the most. Wasn't some giant Grand
Speaker 1: Canyon size pit, that's what it was, just a dry,
Speaker 1: dry river bed. You should just look up pictures. There's
Speaker 1: lots of pictures. There's gonna be it's gonna helps in
Speaker 1: a lot of places to do that. But so Mitchell
Speaker 1: Bach is killed. A lot of people are injured, but
Speaker 1: not nearly as many as could have been. About but
Speaker 1: a quarter of the people that are on board are injured.
Speaker 1: So we have seventy eight injured out of two forty
Speaker 1: eight passengers, plus an additional twenty crew. So that's a
Speaker 1: you know, a quarter people. That's pretty bad. But that's
Speaker 1: all range of injury, right, it's not that's anything from us.
Speaker 1: You know, spring ankle, brained ankle to contusion, yes, yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: so that I mean, you know, it could have been
Speaker 1: some of them. I heard some of them, like about
Speaker 1: seventeen or twenty were very seriously. I'm surest of them
Speaker 1: were minor engines. But the derailment happened, like I said,
Speaker 1: it was at one thirty am. It happened about fifty
Speaker 1: miles west of Phoenix, Arizona, and obviously, of course emergency
Speaker 1: crews scramble to get out to the site as fast
Speaker 1: as they can. Now you might think, okay, well, it's
Speaker 1: a train, it's going over a bridge, it's going fast
Speaker 1: in the middle of nowhere. So it was probably just
Speaker 1: some kind of natural accident, but you would be completely
Speaker 1: wrong to think that, because, as it turns out, it
Speaker 1: was completely and totally intention all sabotage. Yeah, which is
Speaker 1: kind of a bumber. Yeah, And we're gonna we're gonna
Speaker 1: give some of the details on that shortly, but I
Speaker 1: just want to keep going on about in the timeline
Speaker 1: of what happened for the folks in the train. So
Speaker 1: the crew goes along the train and says, hey, everybody,
Speaker 1: stay in the train. That's smart, it's smart. It's the desert,
Speaker 1: it's night. You don't want to go trains and around
Speaker 1: in the middle of nowhere. You're gonna be lost. And
Speaker 1: the rattlesnakes, there's scorpions, you know, exactly, lots of bad animals.
Speaker 1: But eventually people did start getting out of the train
Speaker 1: because the A C is not working, the plumbing is
Speaker 1: not working, so it's a little stinky in the cars.
Speaker 1: And as they started walking around outside the train, uh,
Speaker 1: they started finding printed flyers on the ground, and those
Speaker 1: flyers were held down by rocks, which very quickly led
Speaker 1: everybody to realize they were intentionally placed there. Somebody knew
Speaker 1: that the train was gonna crash beforehand. Yeah, that'd be
Speaker 1: kind of creepy. Oh wow, would freak me the hell out.
Speaker 1: Realize there's cross hairs in the back of your head,
Speaker 1: probably right exactly. So there's a total of four notes
Speaker 1: you're found. They're all identical. I haven't found a verifiable
Speaker 1: copy of it around to know exactly what it said.
Speaker 1: We Devin, you found. I found a copy and it
Speaker 1: was it was two different texts. One was like a
Speaker 1: much longer version of the second one and the one.
Speaker 1: I can't verify either of them, but one of them
Speaker 1: was reported to have been put It was in a
Speaker 1: newspaper afterwards. That was you know, they printed they said
Speaker 1: this is what the letter said basically or something like that. Um,
Speaker 1: and so, yeah, I can't verify that they existed or not,
Speaker 1: but it was. It's good. It's good reading either way
Speaker 1: it is. It's interesting if if the long one is accurate.
Speaker 1: It is a long, meandering ram will about the new
Speaker 1: world order, like you would kind of expect from somebody
Speaker 1: who might do something like yes, and it talks about
Speaker 1: it's it's written from the sons of the Gestapo. Excuse me,
Speaker 1: thank you. Uh So, I don't know if it's right,
Speaker 1: But and this stuff is in the copy that we found.
Speaker 1: There's but and then when you read the reporting on
Speaker 1: the Sunset Limited, it always talks about how the note
Speaker 1: addresses things that were done or is addressed to, I
Speaker 1: should say, the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the
Speaker 1: A T F, the Federal Bureau of Investigation f b I,
Speaker 1: the state Police, and the Sheriff's office, and the notes
Speaker 1: all the I guess I can just call it then
Speaker 1: note since they're identical. The note mentions incidents that those
Speaker 1: agencies were all involved in, one of which is the Waco,
Speaker 1: Texas standoff, which was with David Koresh and the Branch
Speaker 1: of Indians in as well as what happened with at
Speaker 1: Ruby Ridge with Randy Weaver and his family in. And
Speaker 1: then it's that's where it signed Sons of Gestapo. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean this letter has again I can't verify that
Speaker 1: this is what it is, but the text that I
Speaker 1: found has things like the nWo New World Order right
Speaker 1: needs to bring about chaos in America so that it
Speaker 1: can pose martial law, which will be enforced by the
Speaker 1: United Nation troops. The bombing in Oklahoma City was the
Speaker 1: first step in creating this chaos. Many crucial records from
Speaker 1: Waco and Ruby Ridge were destroyed in the bombing, but
Speaker 1: also destroyed where the records from the Germans who were
Speaker 1: brought to this country after World War Two. Their first
Speaker 1: home in America was Oklahoma. It's that letters, and I'm
Speaker 1: inclined to believe that the letters likely were that kind
Speaker 1: of letter. Yes, but the lage and the theme, it's
Speaker 1: kind of anti government kind of stuff, but very world
Speaker 1: order where that writer, so, I think sense of humor
Speaker 1: is comes through this group supposedly as Sons of Gestapo.
Speaker 1: So he's anti government, and I think he wants to
Speaker 1: name himself after a very large, very effective government agency.
Speaker 1: I think he's tweaking us that that's going to come
Speaker 1: up in our very section. Yet you're absolutely right. Um,
Speaker 1: Now here's a problem with the Sons of Gestapo other
Speaker 1: than the fact that they write an unintelligible pamphlet, is
Speaker 1: that I've never heard of him, nobody had, nobody did
Speaker 1: before that, and nobody has heard of them since. And
Speaker 1: it it almost seems as if it's, uh, it's meant
Speaker 1: to redirect the attention away from the people who might
Speaker 1: who are responsible. Yeah, very likely actually, uh, now, that's
Speaker 1: kind of weird and sinister on its own. But even
Speaker 1: more sinister about the derailment and the sabotage is that
Speaker 1: whoever did this knew exactly what they were doing, because
Speaker 1: as they bypassed all bunch of safety stuff. It does
Speaker 1: seem like there should be some kind of safety measures
Speaker 1: there are for trains, like, hey, guess what that got
Speaker 1: derails And we're going to talk about the safety systems,
Speaker 1: and we'll actually talk about the derailment and how it
Speaker 1: was done in depth. It's very It's something that you
Speaker 1: basically can't do anymore, so, which is good. None of
Speaker 1: you group balls who were listening to go out and
Speaker 1: try and do this. Please you're not gonna be able to.
Speaker 1: But also don't be nervous about it happening. You can
Speaker 1: keep taking railway railways well, actually many places around the
Speaker 1: world they're probably still doing it the old fashioned way.
Speaker 1: So there's probably places where you can still do this. Yeah, maybe,
Speaker 1: hopefully I think that they're there are fewer and fewer
Speaker 1: every day. So we're gonna talk about the crash, but
Speaker 1: I first want to describe, just for folks who don't know,
Speaker 1: the anatomy of a rail line. I can't imagine anybody
Speaker 1: who doesn't know, but it is important, it's very let's
Speaker 1: talk about it anyway. Okay, So the anatomy of a railroad,
Speaker 1: by the way, a rail and road set of rails
Speaker 1: on a road. That's literally what the name means. It
Speaker 1: is made up of a series of large wooden beams,
Speaker 1: which called railroad ties, and they sit on a bed
Speaker 1: of gravel and that's literally called your track bed. And
Speaker 1: it has sections of steel rails that are laid across it.
Speaker 1: And those rails are attached to the wooden beams. They're
Speaker 1: tie plates, steel tie plates, or those are attached with
Speaker 1: giant spikes. Yeah, this is really the basics of it.
Speaker 1: Railroad tracks come in two sizes, which isn't really important
Speaker 1: in their length for us, but they do come in
Speaker 1: a multitude of sizes, which is actually I kind of
Speaker 1: got into the science, haven't It's really kind of interesting
Speaker 1: as to for when and how they're they aligned. But
Speaker 1: we're not going to go down that path. I have
Speaker 1: read something very interesting about railroads and why they are
Speaker 1: what is it five or four point eight five inches
Speaker 1: across the physical rail. Yeah, it's very interesting. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of really interesting. Basically, it comes, it goes, it
Speaker 1: comes back to ancient Greece and all that stuff interesting.
Speaker 1: So you're going to have individual sections of rails, and
Speaker 1: those rails are going to be attached to one another
Speaker 1: using a steel plate and big old bolts. Those plates
Speaker 1: are called fish plates, right, and those are they're under right,
Speaker 1: the rails, they're right, that's sorry, they're under the like
Speaker 1: the part that the wheel attaches to. So the easy way,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to use the technical terms. So if
Speaker 1: you are a rail fanatic, I apologize. I'm just trying
Speaker 1: to keep this as simple as possible. A rail is
Speaker 1: I shaped, It's like a capital yes, And so what
Speaker 1: Joe is saying is yes, it is in the middle
Speaker 1: on the upright that they are bolted together in the race.
Speaker 1: The train wheels run on the top of the eye
Speaker 1: and the bottom of the eye sits on the When
Speaker 1: I said under, I meant under the overhang. I knew
Speaker 1: exactly what you meant. That's why I wanted to clarify.
Speaker 1: I think the ibeam is the simplest way to put it. Yes,
Speaker 1: perfect now described a train track the track, yes, just
Speaker 1: the track. Of course, we don't want our two pieces
Speaker 1: of rail coming apart, so they're bolted together. But as
Speaker 1: we talked about, trains move really fast and they have
Speaker 1: a lot of inertia, and if for some reason they
Speaker 1: come apart of conductor is not going to be able
Speaker 1: to easily stop the train if they even see it.
Speaker 1: Do you mean the engineer is it an engineer? I
Speaker 1: always I heard it call the conductor the engineers the
Speaker 1: guy that drives the train, right, and then the conductor
Speaker 1: is a guy that who who takes your ticket and
Speaker 1: and all that stuff. Google says engineers operate the train.
Speaker 1: Conductors don't they do procedural stuff. See this is why
Speaker 1: I shouldn't rely on my childhood knowledge of trains. The
Speaker 1: tank engine was lying to you, freaking Thomas. Okay, but anyway,
Speaker 1: the point is is that you don't want these these
Speaker 1: things driving the train, whoever the guy driving the train,
Speaker 1: the person driving the train to not see that because
Speaker 1: they're not gonna be able to stop it in time.
Speaker 1: So what is done is that a small electric charges
Speaker 1: run through the rails and that is connected to a signal.
Speaker 1: Is it through the rails or through a wire on
Speaker 1: the rails, So the rails the way I understand it,
Speaker 1: and I may be incorrect, but the way I understand
Speaker 1: it is run through the rail because two pieces of
Speaker 1: rail don't always perfectly attached to one another because of
Speaker 1: the fish play expansion contraction. I mean, even though the
Speaker 1: train wheel doesn't know that, they use a wire to
Speaker 1: connect the two and if the current between from the
Speaker 1: rails from one or the other is broken, then that
Speaker 1: flips a SWITCHTCE safe distance away, they say, hey, there's
Speaker 1: a problem. They can stop the train and then send
Speaker 1: somebody out to investigate it. Okay, that's that's the safety system. Okay. Now,
Speaker 1: so I was just gonna say, so, as long as
Speaker 1: the rails are actually touching still, the wire doesn't It
Speaker 1: doesn't matter, right, But the wire is a backup because
Speaker 1: if let's say it's really cold and the steel contracts
Speaker 1: and they've separated enough, the wire is a backup for
Speaker 1: correct or potentially you get corrosion between the fish plate
Speaker 1: and the rail. Yeah, that also happens. Yeah, exactly. I
Speaker 1: just wanted to make sure that I was understanding. Yes,
Speaker 1: you're absolutely correct, And my understanding of the wire is
Speaker 1: that it's it's over long. They do it in coils.
Speaker 1: I did, uh at least used to have. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think they used to have a loop. It's not a
Speaker 1: couple of loops. So I tried to check this out
Speaker 1: a couple of days ago. Please please explain. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: there's some railroad tracks not far from my house, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So I went over there and I started. I wanted
Speaker 1: to see this. I wanted to see this wire, to
Speaker 1: see exactly what it looked like, because I remember seeing
Speaker 1: fish plates on rails when I was a kid. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so I went back to look, like to see
Speaker 1: if that wire I was there. So I started walking,
Speaker 1: and I walk, and I walk and I walk, and
Speaker 1: I must have walked like, you know, almost two yards.
Speaker 1: I'm going, my god, they make these rails really long
Speaker 1: these days. They actually do, especially with you know, through cities,
Speaker 1: they lay the longer ones as much as they can,
Speaker 1: just because it's I don't know if you've noticed this
Speaker 1: or not. I don't know how long it's been since
Speaker 1: you were on a train, But you can't feel when
Speaker 1: you go over the thing, and the slower you go,
Speaker 1: the more you feel it right and goes. So you
Speaker 1: wouldn't want that as much through residential areas. Here's a
Speaker 1: great thing about what Joe did. Joe gets out his
Speaker 1: phone to call a friend to ask about that. They
Speaker 1: have a friend named Tim who's more conversant with railroads
Speaker 1: than me and him and say, Tim, do they weld
Speaker 1: them together? Now? And I get a phone call and
Speaker 1: I answered hello, Hey, what's up. He's like, hey, Tim,
Speaker 1: And I realized this call the prone number, but I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't say anything, what's going on? And that's what
Speaker 1: I pulled my phone away from my face and look
Speaker 1: at it and says, oh, Steve, okay, okay, acsilutely, you
Speaker 1: didn't call me. I just like. The point is is
Speaker 1: that most rails, as Joe has discovered today or well
Speaker 1: did together all, they don't use fish plates. What at
Speaker 1: first I was, I was like, you could go you
Speaker 1: could probably go down to the rail Heritage Museum that's
Speaker 1: also not too from that. Um, they probably have all
Speaker 1: examples of all that stuff out there. Oh yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: sure there's tracks around that have that, just unfortunately these
Speaker 1: particular ones didn't have that pretty frequently. Yeah, so they're
Speaker 1: well did now. They don't have the wire, they don't
Speaker 1: need the wire. They don't need the wire because the
Speaker 1: weld makes the connection and it's actually stronger and it's
Speaker 1: a smoother ride as you were talking about. That's part
Speaker 1: of the reason they may not actually be using the
Speaker 1: longer ones anymore. But because they welded a continuous surface,
Speaker 1: you never know. You can tell you on Amtrak from
Speaker 1: Portland to Seattle they are still using those connectors. Clack, Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's let's get back to the story. This is actually important.
Speaker 1: Though it is important, I just don't want to go
Speaker 1: too far down down that path. Okay, So whoever sabotage
Speaker 1: the Sunset Limited pulled twenty nine of the spikes that
Speaker 1: were holding the rail and the tie plates to the
Speaker 1: railroad ties uh from a single junction between two rails,
Speaker 1: and then they then shifted one of those rails inward
Speaker 1: so that the two were no longer lined up, but
Speaker 1: they moved it inward, and then they re spiked it down.
Speaker 1: And the really kind of hard part is that they
Speaker 1: knew enough to make sure not to break that wire.
Speaker 1: But what that meant is that as the train was
Speaker 1: coming down the line where that junction was, that wheel
Speaker 1: hit a flat, blunt surface. They moved it in far
Speaker 1: enough so that the flat edge was now to the inside.
Speaker 1: What used to be the outside was now made it
Speaker 1: up to the inside of its previous Mate, I thought
Speaker 1: you're a description that you did. I actually did that
Speaker 1: when I was reading through the script earlier, even though
Speaker 1: I had seen I've seen the diagrams that I thought
Speaker 1: that was a really good description. Listeners, Yeah, we'll give
Speaker 1: that to folks here. I just want people to understand
Speaker 1: those that here's the thing. It hit with such force
Speaker 1: because it's a flat, blunt edge it I kid you
Speaker 1: not popped the train wheels right off the track, just
Speaker 1: on that one side, on that one side, which is
Speaker 1: then causes the whole derailment. And any time that this happens,
Speaker 1: you can actually see a big old ding in the
Speaker 1: wheels of the train. So it's a lot of force.
Speaker 1: So let's go back to the analogy that or the
Speaker 1: description that I had while you say, okay, I actually
Speaker 1: have a feeling there's gonna be all kinds of people
Speaker 1: doing this if you're driving. Please don't careful, don't do
Speaker 1: this while you're driving. Just imagine it. No, actually, here,
Speaker 1: it's an easier way to describe it. Take two cards
Speaker 1: of cigarettes, put them and then lucky strikes and then okay,
Speaker 1: So here's how you do it. Okay, So you're gonna
Speaker 1: take the tip of your left thumb and you're gonna
Speaker 1: put it against the tip of your right thumb. And
Speaker 1: then you're gonna take the tip of your left pointer
Speaker 1: finger and you're gonna put it against the tip of
Speaker 1: your right pointer and they're gonna be parallel. And those
Speaker 1: your pointer fingers and your thumbs, those make the rail
Speaker 1: and where they meet that's the rail junction. Showing it
Speaker 1: around like she's a hand model. Now the train is
Speaker 1: gonna be coming down your right arm and it would
Speaker 1: go across that junction and then go back up your
Speaker 1: left arm. The train is going to be coming down
Speaker 1: your right arm, across the junction of your fingers, and
Speaker 1: then back up your left arms. Train going I stopped, Joe.
Speaker 1: Now you're gonna be a saboteur. As a saboteur, what
Speaker 1: you're gonna do is you're gonna take your left pointer
Speaker 1: finger and you're gonna move it inwards so that your
Speaker 1: fingernail of your left pointer fingers touching the pad of
Speaker 1: your right finger the inside. You see how that shifted off.
Speaker 1: Now you understand as that rail because the wheels sit
Speaker 1: inside the rails as it comes from down, it's going
Speaker 1: to hit that flat edge. Shouldn't it be the thumb
Speaker 1: that moves in. It doesn't matter which one, So wait
Speaker 1: to clarify, it's not wheel the whole wheel. They just
Speaker 1: have the lip on the inside, right, because because the
Speaker 1: wheel of trades rides the top and the inside of
Speaker 1: the rail. But it doesn't matter, Joe, which which finger
Speaker 1: you move you go fall? All right? Fine, So this
Speaker 1: is how our saboteurs did the deed basically. Now, whoever
Speaker 1: did this had to work fairly quickly in a general sense,
Speaker 1: because trains would be coming down that line every six
Speaker 1: to twelve hours after the last one it passed by. Sorry,
Speaker 1: should we mention that, as we described before, just to reiterate,
Speaker 1: the medal is still touching, so the current isn't interrupted.
Speaker 1: The medal isn't touching, the wire is still in place.
Speaker 1: The wire that connects the rails was stretched. Now I've
Speaker 1: heard that it was a long enough loop that they
Speaker 1: didn't have to do anything. I've also heard that they
Speaker 1: used what was called a jumper line to add kind
Speaker 1: of like a jumper cable, to add extra link to it,
Speaker 1: but that they did it. They knew that the line
Speaker 1: would be would be interrupted. If they interrupted the signal,
Speaker 1: the whole thing was going to the game was up. Sorry,
Speaker 1: they totally wanted to reiterate that, Yes, but they also knew.
Speaker 1: I mean, they had to do it fast because trains
Speaker 1: are coming down this line every six to twelve hours,
Speaker 1: because it's a heavily used track. They would have had yeah,
Speaker 1: of course, but that's not hard to find out. No,
Speaker 1: the schedules are totally published, but they would have had
Speaker 1: to at least staked out that spot for a while
Speaker 1: to know when the trains came by. And I guess
Speaker 1: the other thing to mention is that in these areas
Speaker 1: there are some areas that aren't this much. But I
Speaker 1: believe in these areas you have one track line for
Speaker 1: all train traffic, so amtrack shares the line with freight line.
Speaker 1: Freight line traffic and freight lines aren't nearly as publicized
Speaker 1: as to when they're coming down the trains. So you can,
Speaker 1: you can if you sit there and stake it out
Speaker 1: and say, okay, the train comes by every Thursday at
Speaker 1: this time. You can, but that's not something that you
Speaker 1: necessarily as a matter of public record, right, And the
Speaker 1: other thing to keep in mind is that the amtrack
Speaker 1: runs on track that is owned by multiple rail companies,
Speaker 1: So this happens to be owned by Southern Pacific the
Speaker 1: spot that we're talking about. But yes, that's a good point,
Speaker 1: so it could have been they would have had to
Speaker 1: actually sit Yeah, they would have stake it out and
Speaker 1: keep keep track of it. I mean that that really
Speaker 1: means that somebody had to sit around and do their
Speaker 1: homework and really plan this at least probably months, a
Speaker 1: good amount of time. So they probably didn't live too
Speaker 1: far away, I would I would guess that they couldn't
Speaker 1: have lived too far away. Now, the FBI, they have
Speaker 1: been working on this case for twenty years. They so
Speaker 1: far have no viable suspects. I've heard mentioned that they
Speaker 1: thought they had a suspect or too, but really it
Speaker 1: turns out they didn't ever really have anybody in mind.
Speaker 1: There were a couple of locals who showed up and
Speaker 1: grabbed them, didn't they Some folks they kind of made themselves,
Speaker 1: you know, a bad name, because they kind of wrangled
Speaker 1: some people up and then turned out they totally had
Speaker 1: no idea what they were doing. But really, they they've
Speaker 1: had no suspects, but then they decided that, well, somebody
Speaker 1: who did this must have had experience with trains. They
Speaker 1: must work. They've got to have experience to know how
Speaker 1: this has happened. But then it was discovered that this
Speaker 1: was not the first time that a train had derailed
Speaker 1: in this very specific way, and that's when the story
Speaker 1: kind of took a turn. There is another train called
Speaker 1: the City of San Francisco which derailed the really close,
Speaker 1: really close in terms of the method. I'm sorry, I
Speaker 1: was just being a jerk about the location in the
Speaker 1: name and the year totally close. Actually it really the
Speaker 1: year is what makes it so interesting. So I'm going
Speaker 1: to talk about this a little bit. But what makes
Speaker 1: the year so interesting is that it's far enough back.
Speaker 1: It's says fifty years. It's not something that I would
Speaker 1: have known as a young man and then been able
Speaker 1: to go out and make this kind of thing happen again.
Speaker 1: It's a long enough span of time that from the
Speaker 1: collective memory for most folks, it didn't happen. So that's
Speaker 1: that's why I find it interest thing. So let's talk
Speaker 1: about the City of San Francisco for a minute. It's
Speaker 1: the train. It's interesting yeah, it's a cool train. By
Speaker 1: the way it was, it was, it was a really
Speaker 1: cool train. We're gonna go back in time. We're gonna
Speaker 1: go to nine nine, specifically August twelve. The city of
Speaker 1: San Francisco is heading westbound train correct, not the entire city,
Speaker 1: just the train. The train has a hundred forty nine
Speaker 1: passengers and a total of fourteen cars. It's about ten
Speaker 1: thirty at night, and it is approaching a bridge over
Speaker 1: the Humboldt River, which is in Nevada. Sometime earlier in
Speaker 1: the day, we don't know when, somebody had removed the
Speaker 1: fish plates the joint bars from the rails and had
Speaker 1: moved the rail line in much like I had described,
Speaker 1: but they had done it part way into a trestle,
Speaker 1: into a bridge that went over a river bed right
Speaker 1: before a curve, right before a curve as well, which
Speaker 1: is what happened with our train wreck as well. The
Speaker 1: Sunset Limited. Yeah. Oh, and by the way, it was,
Speaker 1: it was also Southern Pacific Trail the line. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was also a Southern Pacific line. That's absolutely correct and
Speaker 1: absolutely actually is just pretty much an exact duplicate of this. Really,
Speaker 1: it's very close. There are some things that I don't
Speaker 1: always think are exact. So let's let's do some of this.
Speaker 1: So they private the rails over whoever moved those lines
Speaker 1: wasn't sure that the engineer wouldn't see what was happening.
Speaker 1: So what they did is they painted the end of
Speaker 1: the rail that they had moved. Because it was nighttime,
Speaker 1: the light would catch reflect off the metal they painted.
Speaker 1: I think they painted in a dark green. And then
Speaker 1: they stuck a tumbleweed on top of that junction to
Speaker 1: hide what they had done. Uh. Trains going sixty, which
Speaker 1: for our friends on the metric system is to an hour.
Speaker 1: The first two cars, again just like the Sunset Limited,
Speaker 1: managed to cross the bridge even though they have been
Speaker 1: knocked off of the rail and flew across. Flew across
Speaker 1: would be a good way to do it, uh, And
Speaker 1: they came to a stop just over eight hundred feet away.
Speaker 1: That that is not a good thing though, because the
Speaker 1: engine and the first two cars they go over it
Speaker 1: and they stay in line and they keep traveling. The
Speaker 1: next car, the third car, is knocked off enough that
Speaker 1: it's twists and it actually hits the bridge that it
Speaker 1: is riding across. The bridge is destroyed, essentially at this
Speaker 1: point because train cars are piling into it and tumbling
Speaker 1: all over the place. And I think it was that
Speaker 1: first car where most of the casualties took place. Right.
Speaker 1: I believe the first car, because that car was buried
Speaker 1: the first time it went down. This is not like
Speaker 1: this limited where they're all tied together really well before that,
Speaker 1: they're not articulated together. They came apart and the first
Speaker 1: car was underneath three others. It was the bar car.
Speaker 1: It was the one that went down the lounge. People
Speaker 1: weren't exactly strapped into their seats or anything. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so it uh, it's it was a giant mass of wreckage.
Speaker 1: If you look at the photos, if you look up
Speaker 1: the image, it's a giant mess. It really does look
Speaker 1: like a kid just took train toys and stuck them
Speaker 1: into sand and they're just sticking caddy wampus. That's what
Speaker 1: it looks like. Um, that's a train wreck. I didn't
Speaker 1: actually see the wreck, but I saw right right after
Speaker 1: it was just laying. They're all twisted. It was a
Speaker 1: freight train all twisted and smoking and everything like that.
Speaker 1: And wow, it's amazing a lot of energy there because
Speaker 1: I mean these these cars were all twisted up, and
Speaker 1: they don't build those things, you know, they don't build
Speaker 1: them a weak build out of you know, spitting Elmer's clue. Actually,
Speaker 1: interestingly that the rail Heritage Museum that I was talking about,
Speaker 1: they have cars that I don't know if they are
Speaker 1: actually from the city of San Francisco or not, but
Speaker 1: they're the same color scheme of the same type of
Speaker 1: Pacific There are a lot same same with the Sunset Limited,
Speaker 1: but they have a bunch of those cars. So if
Speaker 1: you ever want, if you're ever in Portland and you
Speaker 1: want to see cars that act like that, I would
Speaker 1: bet those are the Great Northwestern Line probably. I say
Speaker 1: Great Northwestern Line because out where I live. About six
Speaker 1: or seven years ago, I went trooping around and was
Speaker 1: taking pictures of old passenger cars that had gone through
Speaker 1: a fire and there it's really amazing. It was really,
Speaker 1: really interesting. It was totally trespassing, I admit it, but
Speaker 1: I got in there and took a bunch of photos
Speaker 1: because it was just so cool. But I have a
Speaker 1: feeling if those cars were stored here, it wouldn't be
Speaker 1: surprised if others. But then again, the city of San
Speaker 1: Francisco cars were also stored here for a while, a
Speaker 1: lot of them. So it's in the Brooklyn Yards. Yeah,
Speaker 1: um that I mean, if I'm sure that everybody he
Speaker 1: lives near some place where there's old train cars because
Speaker 1: they were built roll sturdy, not like Amtrak ones dictated
Speaker 1: the fate of those old cars they left outside. Well,
Speaker 1: that's not so good. Turns out Brooklyn Yard was really
Speaker 1: good for those. Yeah, there's a lot of well we
Speaker 1: live in a very wet area to cover that stuff. Okay,
Speaker 1: so let's let's get back to the city of San Francisco. Though.
Speaker 1: I just people were killed, which is surprisingly few for
Speaker 1: the amount of but looking at those pictures though, like
Speaker 1: you would expect. But I'm talking about to kill the deaths, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess that's no injury numbers in this that's just
Speaker 1: but that's a lot. That's a huge, a lot of people.
Speaker 1: And you know, at the time, it was a lot
Speaker 1: of theories were floated. It was they were saying that
Speaker 1: the rail line was mismanaged by Southern Pacific or that
Speaker 1: they were covering something up. But it quickly became apparent
Speaker 1: that somebody had sabotegy. It was that was before they
Speaker 1: had actually and actually inspected the lines. Right once they
Speaker 1: looked at the actual rail they were like, oh, just kidding,
Speaker 1: that is bad. So the rail lines were really um.
Speaker 1: They were drunk on their own power, I'll say at
Speaker 1: the time, and they we don't have to tell you anything.
Speaker 1: We're doing what we're doing. So of course people started talking,
Speaker 1: and then days later they started publicizing what they had.
Speaker 1: I think that quashed a lot of the rumors and
Speaker 1: the conspiracies that were out there. The theories. We can't
Speaker 1: do away with all of them. Yeah, there was one
Speaker 1: theory that they got out there just immediately and got
Speaker 1: on the train and actually actually did the sabotage to
Speaker 1: make it look like an accident, which it really would
Speaker 1: be hellaciously hard. It's actually impossible to climb under train
Speaker 1: and move the rail, and sitting on now turns out
Speaker 1: yeah crazy. So besides having been done essentially the same way,
Speaker 1: there's another thing that links the City of San Francisco
Speaker 1: derailment to the Sunset Limited derailment. Yeah, and that is
Speaker 1: a article that came out. I would say that it
Speaker 1: I would say that it is the reason that the
Speaker 1: Sunset Limited derailment happened the way it did. I will
Speaker 1: disagree with that, but give me a minute. Okay. So
Speaker 1: here's what we're bringing up is that in October of
Speaker 1: article came out in a magazine called sp train Line
Speaker 1: talking about how the sabotage was done. It was written
Speaker 1: by a guy named John Signer. He wrote an article,
Speaker 1: and of course, the the the FBI immediately show up
Speaker 1: at his doorstep when they figured it figured out it
Speaker 1: was out there, they started interrogating and questioning him about this. Uh.
Speaker 1: He of course sang like a canary and gave him
Speaker 1: whatever information they wanted to. I don't blame him if
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, yeah, I mean, how did the FBI
Speaker 1: find out about this? I don't know how they found
Speaker 1: out about it, to be quite honest, that has never
Speaker 1: been specified how they figured it out, but they wanted
Speaker 1: kind of I'm kind of wondering if John Signer actually
Speaker 1: when he heard about it and he had just written
Speaker 1: that article, I'm kind of thinking he might have contacted them.
Speaker 1: Well he might have because his article came out before
Speaker 1: the derailment, right before the derailment. Yeah, but it could
Speaker 1: be that he called him. I don't know, But what
Speaker 1: they wanted to know is the details of it where
Speaker 1: he got his details and oh, by the way, who
Speaker 1: gets this magazine? They really wanted to know and it wasn't.
Speaker 1: It was a fairly small publication. It's a teeny publication.
Speaker 1: So here's the deal. I tried to contact him. I
Speaker 1: wanted to talk to him about what was going on.
Speaker 1: He never replied to any of our our attempts. So then, yeah,
Speaker 1: which is fine. I totally then turned around and picked
Speaker 1: up I was able to get a back issue of
Speaker 1: this particular magazine for anybody who wants to know. It's
Speaker 1: issue number forty five, which is the fall issue. And
Speaker 1: it's really interesting. I know. I gave it to Joe
Speaker 1: after I'd read it. There's a lot of really cool
Speaker 1: information about the cars that to me, you said, Joe
Speaker 1: could have it first. You know, you could have it next.
Speaker 1: But there's a lot of cool information about the cars
Speaker 1: that are in the city of San Francisco line. One
Speaker 1: of the things I love about it is how every
Speaker 1: every car gets its own name and that and there
Speaker 1: were too to do great ones Twin Peaks and Chinatown
Speaker 1: because Twin Peaks is one of my favorite TV shows
Speaker 1: way back when. N is one of the best. Yeah,
Speaker 1: great movie. If you haven't seen it, you must see it.
Speaker 1: It actually holds up. I watched it six months ago.
Speaker 1: It totally holds up. But so, yeah, this came out really,
Speaker 1: I mean probably like nine or ten days before. No,
Speaker 1: it's more like a month or so. What was the
Speaker 1: October would come out in October or September. So that's
Speaker 1: the thing is that it doesn't have a date on
Speaker 1: it says it's the fall issue, and on their website
Speaker 1: they have a month listed. But it had to have
Speaker 1: come out ahead of time. And you know magazines do that.
Speaker 1: You subscribe in September October, Yeah, you get them early.
Speaker 1: But it was a quarterly magazine as well. All it
Speaker 1: came out every three months. But I read the article,
Speaker 1: and the article is really light on details of how
Speaker 1: this happened. I figured out a lot more by finding
Speaker 1: drawings and articles that were written by people who were
Speaker 1: analyzing the crash. Is enough though, I mean really, if
Speaker 1: you read that, if you knew about trains, it would
Speaker 1: be enough to tell you how to do it. If
Speaker 1: you didn't know about trains, it would be just enough
Speaker 1: to get your run over by a train, I think,
Speaker 1: because you'd be screwed around on the tracks and the
Speaker 1: train would run you all. And I guess one could
Speaker 1: could also argue that if you know about trains, you
Speaker 1: probably know how to do something like this. Anyway, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not such a hard thing to do. And here's
Speaker 1: the thing is that the majority of the information that
Speaker 1: describes what was done in his article, it is quotes
Speaker 1: from the then in this is in President of Southern Pacific,
Speaker 1: a guy by the name of Angus McDonald, and he
Speaker 1: was talking about it the Rex six days after it happened,
Speaker 1: So it's quotes from him, which I feel like if
Speaker 1: it's in this those quotes were everywhere, so it would
Speaker 1: have been in a ba jillion locations that people could
Speaker 1: have pulled that content from. Although not so I mean, yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: on the one hand, yes, but you know, from nineteen nine,
Speaker 1: it's not as convenient as saying, hey, this thing hits
Speaker 1: someone's mailbox, but conveniently close number of But if you're
Speaker 1: a trained enthusiast, you work on the line, or you
Speaker 1: really like trains, you know your history. I mean, I
Speaker 1: was on some of the forums and the things that
Speaker 1: people were rattling off was just like the sheer amount
Speaker 1: of information. It's it's kind of like guys who know
Speaker 1: the stats for the Super Bowls or baseball games. I'm
Speaker 1: just I'm just arguing that it's like an OCAM's razor
Speaker 1: sort of thing. Is just amazingly it's a huge coincidence
Speaker 1: that these things happened so close together. So while it's
Speaker 1: you know, while it's really easy to say, well, anybody
Speaker 1: could have found that information, that's true, yes, but it
Speaker 1: is super convenient that the information was in someone's mailbox
Speaker 1: within a month of having this happen again. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: even though it was even though it was kind of
Speaker 1: light on the details, I mean, there were enough. There's
Speaker 1: enough in there, and there were photographs and stuff too
Speaker 1: that showed pretty get in probably enough to have just
Speaker 1: like to spark the idea. Right, if you know about trains,
Speaker 1: I don't know that you necessarily think, I know, I
Speaker 1: will derail a train by doing this thing that I
Speaker 1: know how to do. But if you read a thing
Speaker 1: about it and you go, oh, yeah, that's how I
Speaker 1: can sabotage the train. That's how I can that's into it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not in disacreem, and I just I feel like
Speaker 1: the magazine may not have been as uh Prime. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well no, it's just the magazine gives it gives you,
Speaker 1: gives you the idea. You're a guy who works for
Speaker 1: the railroad. Let's say, and so you think, oh, I
Speaker 1: better know how they did that. They just moved the
Speaker 1: rail over a couple of inches in Waha. Yeah. Well
Speaker 1: let's uh. I think we've we've talked about what happened enough.
Speaker 1: I think we need to get into theories. It's about
Speaker 1: time time. It's way past my bedtime, Okay. Our first
Speaker 1: suspect is slash. Theory is sons of Gesta. Yes, let's
Speaker 1: have the shadowy organization. Yeah, Joe, uh so if anybody does,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna need your help here in a second show.
Speaker 1: Anybody who doesn't know you may recognize the name Gestapo. Joe,
Speaker 1: You're gonna have to pronounce what that that stands for
Speaker 1: because it's an abbreviation, and I cannot. My German is
Speaker 1: a little rusty. But I would say, is uh guy
Speaker 1: him less? Start pull it? Si okay better than me?
Speaker 1: I I just pronounced that. Which But the Gestapo were
Speaker 1: the secret state police in Germany for the Nazis. That's
Speaker 1: probably where you recognize that name from. Absolutely it is
Speaker 1: The easy answer is to think that the sons of
Speaker 1: Gestapo are actually the ones that did this and then
Speaker 1: left notes claiming it because they were some kind of racist,
Speaker 1: slash hate slash crazy people group. Very easy to think that,
Speaker 1: But as I said before, they never showed up before,
Speaker 1: and they never showed up again. I guess I will
Speaker 1: just quickly say that again. I don't know if they
Speaker 1: were right or not. But the flyers, the copies of flyers,
Speaker 1: the texts of flyers that we found, don't seem like
Speaker 1: a racist or hate group. They seem like a paranoid
Speaker 1: conspiracy group, but they don't. It doesn't seem like they
Speaker 1: are trying to promote some kind of propaganda of hate
Speaker 1: or anything. All right, So does that make sense? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that totally makes sense. And yeah, I wanna I wanna
Speaker 1: jump ahead here a little bit because the reason I
Speaker 1: use those terms is that when I took a look
Speaker 1: at the state of Arizona, Oh, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of hate, a lot of hate. There were in two
Speaker 1: thousand and fourteen, there were sixteen active hate groups, plus
Speaker 1: the little ones that just passed under the radar, plus
Speaker 1: the little militias. Where did you find this this list
Speaker 1: that I don't remember where I was at, Joe, I was,
Speaker 1: I was doing all kinds of googles on this stuff
Speaker 1: and just kind of information. There's probably much more than that,
Speaker 1: or and maybe there's fewer. But the point is, I
Speaker 1: guess there's a lot of groups that are very secular
Speaker 1: in that manner, which is why I use that term, right,
Speaker 1: But I think there are also a lot of groups
Speaker 1: who are not considered hate groups that are that kind
Speaker 1: of you know, New World order everything like that that exists,
Speaker 1: and they do they often do do these one off things,
Speaker 1: you know. It's there's a lot of mysteries that we've
Speaker 1: covered in the past where it's like this one weird
Speaker 1: thing happened and we don't know why, and all of
Speaker 1: a sudden we think, oh, it's this one crazy person
Speaker 1: who really believes in the New World Order. So I'm
Speaker 1: happy to say that it's the Sons of Thank You
Speaker 1: um and that that it's just a one off crazy
Speaker 1: person that has called themselves that, not a group at large. Whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I mean, you know, Timothy McVeigh was kind
Speaker 1: of a one off thing thing too. I suspect this
Speaker 1: was not a group though, But well, let's let's go ahead, though,
Speaker 1: Let's let's suspend all of that. Let's just operate under
Speaker 1: the presumption that Sons of Gestapo is an organization and
Speaker 1: they have some kind of agenda. Sure, okay, even though
Speaker 1: again I've never heard of before and haven't ever heard
Speaker 1: of them. Again, it could be some small sell organization.
Speaker 1: I don't know. But if you think about what's in
Speaker 1: the letter, the notes ignoring the New World Order part, okay,
Speaker 1: let's let's take that out of the frame for a second,
Speaker 1: and we only read into the stuff that talks about
Speaker 1: David Koresh and the branch of Vidians, in which, if
Speaker 1: you don't know, for folks who don't, they were an
Speaker 1: organization that the government. The simple version is a lot
Speaker 1: of shots were fired, the place went up and spoke.
Speaker 1: And then if you also think about Ruby Ridge, which
Speaker 1: was a situation where the two guys, Randy Weaver and
Speaker 1: Ken Harris, who the government had a siege on their
Speaker 1: compound and uh Weaver's wife and child were killed. I
Speaker 1: thought it was just his wife and not his not
Speaker 1: his baby. They got killed. She was holding the baby,
Speaker 1: but I thought she got shot. I thought his sons
Speaker 1: got shot as well. I guess for me, like either way,
Speaker 1: he suffered a great loss. And so somebody may have
Speaker 1: said you and there I remember this as a you know,
Speaker 1: I was in high school at the time, and it
Speaker 1: was all over the news and people were outraged about
Speaker 1: this and oh my gosh, all these things that are
Speaker 1: going on. It may have been that somebody finally said,
Speaker 1: you know what, I have to have an outlet. I
Speaker 1: have to show the world how screwed up this government
Speaker 1: is for doing this stuff. And my way of going
Speaker 1: about that is that I'm gonna derail this train, but
Speaker 1: this is this is how we're gonna make it happen. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The problem with that is is that you're killing a
Speaker 1: lot more civilians and government employees number one, number two,
Speaker 1: none of them employees of the B A. T. F
Speaker 1: of the FBI. Absolutely true, But but then again, there
Speaker 1: was a lot of I'm going to use the phrase
Speaker 1: lone gunman. I mean McVeigh, Timothy McVeigh. He in Oklahoma City.
Speaker 1: It's the I'm know I'm going to pronounce this wrong,
Speaker 1: so please if I do, sorry, It's the Alfred P. P.
Speaker 1: Murra Federal Building. That's how it's pronounced it. Every time
Speaker 1: I said it before. I felt like I said from
Speaker 1: but you know he did that. He took the law
Speaker 1: into his own hands. Weird fun fact. By the way,
Speaker 1: McVeigh was at Waco handing out flyers in wacos nine.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, yeah, I'm sorry, I confused me. Don't do that.
Speaker 1: I'm easily confused. I just thought you meant like he
Speaker 1: was in Wicko when this was happening, not like he
Speaker 1: was in when that was happening, got it, handing up
Speaker 1: pro gun flyers. Of course he was. But it's totally
Speaker 1: totally possible that there was some group who did this
Speaker 1: and then the group disbanded, or it was a person.
Speaker 1: I think I've talked about this before. Have you guys
Speaker 1: read The Monkey Wrench Gang? Yeah, well actually I haven't
Speaker 1: read it, but I've heard of it. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: I know I've talked about this on the podcast before.
Speaker 1: It's a book from the seventies about radical environmentalists. But
Speaker 1: they do this thing, and then once that thing is done,
Speaker 1: they totally disband. I have read that book, Yes, I
Speaker 1: read it in middle school. Yeah, just don't worry about
Speaker 1: why I read it. That's fine, Just don't worry about that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think was one of the characters. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think the glyns is the book after part of
Speaker 1: it is. I think you don't think it through a lot.
Speaker 1: You don't think about the fact that the authorities are
Speaker 1: not going to publish your letter. You would assume you
Speaker 1: leave these letters all around and it's going to make
Speaker 1: it into the news and people are going to spread
Speaker 1: what you're saying, and that's going to happen. And then
Speaker 1: you know, you do this thing, which is not great,
Speaker 1: and then you weave a letter and you think my
Speaker 1: message will be just everywhere, and then the FBI says, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: we're no, we're not going to publicize this at all,
Speaker 1: because why wouldn't we publicize this letter, And you go,
Speaker 1: but here's the deal, is open it up for copycats?
Speaker 1: Well but yeah, oh no, you you definitely do. But
Speaker 1: this so this guy. If if these guys were really
Speaker 1: a thing and their note didn't get published by the FBI,
Speaker 1: all they gotta do is send a letter to a newspaper.
Speaker 1: Maybe you're sending letters to several newspapers. That's all you
Speaker 1: gotta do. If they had truly been a sort of
Speaker 1: political movement or trying to that's what would have happened
Speaker 1: if I agree, I'm not going to disagree with that.
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna argue both sides. Okay, fine, that's fine.
Speaker 1: You're gonna stand and go both sides of the tracks. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: we're gonna go to our next theory slash suspect, which
Speaker 1: is an angry employee of named angry employee unnamed angry employee. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's this is a good one. It actually is
Speaker 1: kind of a good one. So if we look at
Speaker 1: what happened after the derailment, we're gonna move to Southern Pacific,
Speaker 1: who ran the or managed that portion of the line.
Speaker 1: They were they were merged with Union Pacific, who is
Speaker 1: another giant rail line, and people still to this day
Speaker 1: you can see Southern Pacific and Union Pacific cars running
Speaker 1: all over this country. If you're near a freight line,
Speaker 1: you'll see them. Um. Well, the mergers of companies a
Speaker 1: don't happen overnight and be they tend to not happen
Speaker 1: as a surprise. And see everybody always looks at mergers
Speaker 1: as well. There's a bunch of people who are going
Speaker 1: to get laid off. You're going to lose your job
Speaker 1: if you're merging. The thought, right is that you are
Speaker 1: you already have overlapped that you're competing in, and that
Speaker 1: your goal is to eliminate the competition in that area,
Speaker 1: so that there are two employees there and one of
Speaker 1: them is going to go not always the case, not
Speaker 1: always the case. And so the theory here is that
Speaker 1: somebody who was a railroad employee was opposed to the
Speaker 1: merger and worried that they could potentially be losing their
Speaker 1: maybe they were losing their and so what they do
Speaker 1: is they went ahead and they intentionally sabotage the line
Speaker 1: in an attempt to make this such a bad thing
Speaker 1: that the merger with Union Pacific wouldn't go through and
Speaker 1: therefore their their position would be safe. That's that's that's
Speaker 1: really the basis of this. The worst theory I've ever heard.
Speaker 1: It's but there's there's variance on that somebody who got fired,
Speaker 1: somebody who knew somebody who got fired. That's either by
Speaker 1: Amtrak or by Southern Pacific. It could be Idlan. So
Speaker 1: there's there's been a lot of suspects to look at.
Speaker 1: But the problem with the I'm opposed to the merger,
Speaker 1: or we can't we hate amtrack blah blah blah. Is
Speaker 1: that Southern Pacific itself had been in decline for a
Speaker 1: long time. In the early nineteen hundred, Southern Pacific was
Speaker 1: known as the Octopus because there they had so many
Speaker 1: long done, they had so many lines, and they sprawled
Speaker 1: so far all over this country, and their central help
Speaker 1: was on the west coast. That they were they were huge,
Speaker 1: but of course they were declining just like everybody else.
Speaker 1: And by the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties they were
Speaker 1: in a dire situation and people were probably more worried
Speaker 1: about losing their job because the lines were getting shut
Speaker 1: down than anything else. So so the net case, it
Speaker 1: makes rational sense to not a post a merger and
Speaker 1: not screw up the line. But you know, and I
Speaker 1: talked to people all the time who believe all sorts
Speaker 1: of in any things that simply aren't true, And so
Speaker 1: you know, don't overrule ignorance and dumb. Know that's that's
Speaker 1: an actual thing. Though you're laughing, but I mean it is.
Speaker 1: Though you're right, I shouldn't be laughing at it, but
Speaker 1: it is true. There are people who just don't believe
Speaker 1: any propaganda that's throwing But here's the Here's the interesting
Speaker 1: thing is that from the job lost perspective, I looked
Speaker 1: up the merger of Union Pacific and Southern Pacific, and
Speaker 1: I couldn't find any reporting that ever talked about the
Speaker 1: number of jobs that were cut. Doesn't mean jobs weren't cut,
Speaker 1: but it sounds to me like maybe it wasn't a
Speaker 1: giant slash and burn operation. It might have been, would
Speaker 1: have been reported. You have found some news I would
Speaker 1: have expected to, and I never. I never found hardly
Speaker 1: anything about it. None of them ever talked about that,
Speaker 1: So I feel like the merger was kind of an
Speaker 1: amicable thing. Well, the thing about it is, you know,
Speaker 1: you need if this guy was employed to say, working
Speaker 1: on the tracks, which it sounds like he had the
Speaker 1: tools to do that kind of stuff, then they really
Speaker 1: can't cut that workforce by all that much. If at
Speaker 1: all they still have its probably a pretty thin workforce
Speaker 1: at that time anywhere. Probably, Yeah, I still have to
Speaker 1: maintain those tracks. Yeah. And you actually bring up a
Speaker 1: good point right there, which is as an employee, you've
Speaker 1: got the tools, which is kind of an important thing here.
Speaker 1: There's two ways to pull the spikes out. You can
Speaker 1: use a hydraulic tool which makes it go super fast.
Speaker 1: But you've got to have the truck and the machinery
Speaker 1: to do that, and it's it's kind of obvious if
Speaker 1: that's happening, or you've got to use a giant pride bar.
Speaker 1: And those pride bars are, you know, pretty the height
Speaker 1: of a man. They're five or six feet high, the
Speaker 1: height of a person. Devon, don't give me that. Look.
Speaker 1: There's a third way, okay, uh, when I did this,
Speaker 1: this when I was a kid, and that is you know,
Speaker 1: you and your friends walk along the tracks and you
Speaker 1: look for loose ones and you pull them out. But
Speaker 1: they pulled so many of them out that's impossible, I know,
Speaker 1: and that's not going to have that kind of luck.
Speaker 1: But that means that they would have been using company tools,
Speaker 1: which means they were company tools that nobody could tell
Speaker 1: where they were used at and nobody would look at
Speaker 1: the company tools and never be able to know if
Speaker 1: the company tools were used on this particular site. It's
Speaker 1: not so hard to find a long crowbar, You're right.
Speaker 1: You can go to you can go to the home
Speaker 1: depot and buy a giant crowbar, but it takes a
Speaker 1: lot of effort. And time to pull those things manually. Well,
Speaker 1: the hydraulic one is why I think that if it
Speaker 1: was an employee, it would have been done via hydraul
Speaker 1: So here's a question, how often do you know how
Speaker 1: often that line was inspected? I don't. Is that something
Speaker 1: inspected regularly, but I don't know what the frequency of
Speaker 1: regular means. So I guess my question would be, is
Speaker 1: that something you can pull a couple spikes up every
Speaker 1: day or whatever, and then you just wait until it's
Speaker 1: your right hour to pull up the really important ones
Speaker 1: where the lines or the rail are joined to other,
Speaker 1: push it over and then spike them back down. Is
Speaker 1: that do you think? I mean that's because for me,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like a canvas, right you can pull
Speaker 1: certain pins out and the canvas won't collapse on itself.
Speaker 1: And then it could be it's something that you would
Speaker 1: be doing over time until you find exactly the right moment.
Speaker 1: I could see if somebody was able to pull let's say,
Speaker 1: half a dozen a day. They I think they pulled
Speaker 1: like spikes something in that neighborhood. It was in the twenties,
Speaker 1: so I could see over the course of two days
Speaker 1: doing it half a dozen more at a time, and
Speaker 1: then the rail the line not moving, you haven't weakened
Speaker 1: its foundations, and then on that last day yank and
Speaker 1: the remaining half or third or quarter or whatever. That
Speaker 1: is absolutely plausible. That's absolutely a possible way to do it.
Speaker 1: I't even thought about that. I always imagine this job
Speaker 1: isn't all at once. I you know, I had to
Speaker 1: until literally that's just the small time. I still think
Speaker 1: you could have pulled them at once to if you
Speaker 1: had that right to not that hard to people or whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I just mean if if, if, if we're saying
Speaker 1: it was done by a crowbar that you get you know,
Speaker 1: like ace or home deeper or whatever. It is going
Speaker 1: to take you longer. It is manual work. But if
Speaker 1: that's what you have, you might do it days. Makes
Speaker 1: it easy to not be caught on the track pulling
Speaker 1: spikes when the next car, next train comes down the line. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well you can hear the trains and field that you can,
Speaker 1: but you know what, you know, people on the guys
Speaker 1: that are driving that train, they see what's down the line,
Speaker 1: and unless it's hidden behind something like that's weird. There
Speaker 1: was some dude on the track yesterday, Hey, somebody reported
Speaker 1: a dude on the track again today there's a thing
Speaker 1: called desert camouflage. But also or standing right under the
Speaker 1: trust all wearing it right now, I can barely see,
Speaker 1: but you hear the train coming, you can feel it.
Speaker 1: For a wild way, just jump right under the bridge,
Speaker 1: right if you're standing under the bridge, they're not going
Speaker 1: to see you standing under there. You just sit down
Speaker 1: for all it goes by and then you know. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The other thing about the spot that they picked her
Speaker 1: I should say he picked is there's uh or she
Speaker 1: come on terrorism here is that there's a road just
Speaker 1: to the east of the rail line, although it's not
Speaker 1: much of a road. Uh, it's really hardly a road
Speaker 1: at all. But that's that was but that that wasn't
Speaker 1: the case back then. Oh yeah, it wasn't there then,
Speaker 1: because I would imagine it would be for maintenance purposes
Speaker 1: and such. According to the articles and stuff that I've read,
Speaker 1: a lot of the roads were at best barely there
Speaker 1: because they were farmland. So it wasn't an easy It
Speaker 1: took an hour and a half to get to the
Speaker 1: wreck side of the side of the wreck from Phoenix,
Speaker 1: so you were driving on these ad bad roads now today,
Speaker 1: evidently it doesn't take that long because the roads are
Speaker 1: much better. But they've been created, so I don't know,
Speaker 1: but don't rely on that, right, Okay. I was going
Speaker 1: to move to our next theory slash suspect, and let's
Speaker 1: you have any other on that that? Okay, really our
Speaker 1: last Oh, actually fun fact before we move on. You
Speaker 1: keep saying fun fact and then not saying things that
Speaker 1: are fun. This is actually a fun fact. So I
Speaker 1: didn't know this until my research. But according to the Internet,
Speaker 1: you know who Sprint is, right, like the phone company,
Speaker 1: the cell phone company. H turns out, according to the
Speaker 1: research that I came across, Sprint was created by Southern Pacific. Well,
Speaker 1: it was created. Uh. The acronym of Sprint stands for
Speaker 1: Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network networking telephone. That's what's a telephone? No,
Speaker 1: I don't care, it's telephony. No, it's telephone. It was.
Speaker 1: It was an internal communications system and then it and
Speaker 1: they branched it out and it eventually became Sprint the cellphone.
Speaker 1: There you go. So, hey, something good, something large from
Speaker 1: Southern Pacific. Last theory, it was somebody angry at the
Speaker 1: rail line because they were the rail line was taking
Speaker 1: their land, because when it's a government organization, they don't
Speaker 1: know if anybody you've ever had this where they annex
Speaker 1: your land, they say, hey, we're gonna pay you a
Speaker 1: price for this land, and you say take a hike.
Speaker 1: They say, well, you can give it to us for
Speaker 1: this amount of money, or we can just take it.
Speaker 1: Called Yes, because my family had property taken for that
Speaker 1: very reason where they take it for the greater good
Speaker 1: of the country. Yes, that's exactly. It was an access
Speaker 1: road and right, well yeah, yeah, but they pay you
Speaker 1: a rate, and it could very well be that somebody
Speaker 1: was p oed because it was that and was taken
Speaker 1: from them, or it ran through the middle of their farmland.
Speaker 1: And it's a giant nuisance because you can't drive across
Speaker 1: the field. You gotta drive twenty minutes that way and
Speaker 1: then hang a left turn and then hang another left
Speaker 1: turn and drag twenty minutes back the other direction when
Speaker 1: you could have just gone two minutes straight. This feels
Speaker 1: silly because we literally just talked about the fact that
Speaker 1: this rail line had been established since like the late
Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds. Right, that's true, But they move not they
Speaker 1: move lines, and they upgrade lines and they may have expanded.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know, Devon. I'm saying that this
Speaker 1: is the theory that is out the theory. I'm just
Speaker 1: dispelling it. I agree that the problem is this sounds
Speaker 1: like crazy farmer John when freaking crazy and did this
Speaker 1: crazy thing because he's crazy farmer John. And that's all
Speaker 1: there is to the theory. Yeah, there's not much there. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So I was just giving my two cents of I
Speaker 1: feel like that's dumb because I feel like the train
Speaker 1: through rail has been there forever train rails a technical term.
Speaker 1: And here's the other thing. Is the other thing is
Speaker 1: that is that after you've you've done your dear nasty
Speaker 1: deat against Southern Pacific and AMTRAC, guess what, the tracks
Speaker 1: don't go away. They're still there. Huh. If you really
Speaker 1: wanted to do that, you would get rid of that
Speaker 1: whole trustle, right, you would, really you get rid of
Speaker 1: a big old chunk of the rail. Well, you do
Speaker 1: something way more destructive. Wait, wait, Devin, you you just
Speaker 1: may have hit on something, which is if you remember
Speaker 1: the nine nine City of San Francisco line, when that derailed,
Speaker 1: destroyed the trestle. They actually moved. Joe was and I
Speaker 1: were talking about this the other day. Is if you
Speaker 1: look at pictures of where that line is now, they've
Speaker 1: moved it. They've taken out one of the trestles, they
Speaker 1: moved the line so it only crosses the river once.
Speaker 1: And that maybe somebody who had that idea that like
Speaker 1: the are you. Then they would have to not know
Speaker 1: anything about trains, which goes against everything that we've been
Speaker 1: talking about, because they would have to know. They would
Speaker 1: have to not know that the car improvements had been
Speaker 1: made so that they don't do that anymore. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is both ways your damn if If you don't,
Speaker 1: I think it's probably not. You might be a local
Speaker 1: recor rescue worker who wanted some overtime. I don't think
Speaker 1: that's it. You don't think so, Okay, that's all of
Speaker 1: my theories. You guys got anything else? I got a
Speaker 1: couple of theories. Okay, this is a fun one one possibility.
Speaker 1: And this again it's like, you know, kind of weak
Speaker 1: but just conjecture. But maybe somebody on the train had
Speaker 1: an enemy who wanted him dead. It's Joe's go to
Speaker 1: theory time. Kids. This is why I really wish people
Speaker 1: could hear my eyes roll. Yeah, if we were doing
Speaker 1: like the show, that would be much improved. But it
Speaker 1: is possible though, it's just certainly I think more plausible
Speaker 1: in the crazy Farmer theory. I would agree, I would Yeah.
Speaker 1: And you know, it could have been it could have
Speaker 1: been somebody, say who it could have been one of
Speaker 1: the crew, like say, you know the engineer or the conductor,
Speaker 1: who you know the guy who did get killed? Even
Speaker 1: possibly they knew they were gonna be on that train
Speaker 1: and they knew when the train ran, and yeah's apply one.
Speaker 1: Another possibility is that it was just just some random,
Speaker 1: twisted lunatic like kind of like the Union bomber. Have
Speaker 1: you ever heard of Sylvester Matushka. Why do I recognize
Speaker 1: that name? Yeah? Wait? Wait is he? Wait? Wait? Is
Speaker 1: he in Europe? Yeah? Hungarian? Yes, I know who you're
Speaker 1: talking about. Yeah, he has a mechanical engineer who got
Speaker 1: a really got a charge out of causing train crashes.
Speaker 1: So he yeah, and so at night and like August
Speaker 1: August thirty one, he caused a derail with nineteen thirty one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he he derailed the Berlin Bosel Express train in Germany.
Speaker 1: And no desks in that case, but a lot of
Speaker 1: people got injured. And then a month later in September,
Speaker 1: he blew up a bridge. This it was a Vieta
Speaker 1: express us was going towards Vienna and caught it crossed
Speaker 1: a bridge over a deep ravine near Budapest, and he
Speaker 1: blew up the bridge. It plunged into the ravine. Twenty
Speaker 1: two people died and a whole bunch of other people
Speaker 1: get severely And he psycho that he was, he was,
Speaker 1: he was right there on the spot because he was apparently,
Speaker 1: like I said, got off on this. And at the
Speaker 1: time when when the guilty party at the scene of
Speaker 1: the crime, jumping up and down going yeah, I know.
Speaker 1: Well at the time he was. He was questioned a
Speaker 1: little bit, but he said he had been riding on
Speaker 1: the train and he just crawled out and that's why
Speaker 1: you're standing here. And so they let him go. But
Speaker 1: eventually the law caught up with him later. It's an
Speaker 1: interesting story, but his his motive was apparently, and he
Speaker 1: was quoted as saying, quote, direct trains because I like
Speaker 1: to see people die. I like to hear them scream unquote.
Speaker 1: So maybe it was just some flaming psycho. That's possible.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can't rule it out, absolutely cannot. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, interesting thing about Sylvester anyway, he got he
Speaker 1: got tried for his crimes and he was locked away
Speaker 1: in prison, but he escaped in and he was never
Speaker 1: heard from again. Yeah, another mystery. We let's talk about
Speaker 1: that one someday. Okay. Uh, So we're at the end. Uh.
Speaker 1: The reassurances that I wanted to give people. I think
Speaker 1: we've talked about a that they well the lines together
Speaker 1: now for the most part, and they are doing that
Speaker 1: a to make it a more comfortable run to to
Speaker 1: be because people can't sabotage the line, well not not
Speaker 1: in that particular way. They can still sabotage the line,
Speaker 1: but yes, they can't do it the way that we've
Speaker 1: talked about. And see it actually makes the line itself
Speaker 1: overall more structurally sound therefore reduces wear and tear. So
Speaker 1: that that's a really big reason why they do. The
Speaker 1: other thing that we talked about that is a reassurance
Speaker 1: for folks is that the connections between cars today are
Speaker 1: engineered to withstand a force at nine miles an hour
Speaker 1: and words, trains don't ever go, not not often definitely
Speaker 1: start building high speed rail. Hey yeah, but then those
Speaker 1: trains do go sixty plus to seventy plus, but they can.
Speaker 1: But the point is they are built to withstand the
Speaker 1: strain put on them at twist torsion. Tortion is the
Speaker 1: word I'm looking for while moving at nine miles. So
Speaker 1: they're not going to break, which is why they are
Speaker 1: so much safer. And we don't get the crazy pilots.
Speaker 1: So take trains, guys. So trains are still safe just
Speaker 1: like planes. I really really swear they are. Yeah they are. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: let's get onto the fun details, the last little bits
Speaker 1: and bits that we have, the parts that you all
Speaker 1: skip over, yep, So don't go ahead, because we have
Speaker 1: little things in here that we need to talk about
Speaker 1: you need to be aware of, so no skipping this time.
Speaker 1: First off, we're gonna talk about our website. Website is,
Speaker 1: of course, Thinking Sideways podcast dot com. We're going to
Speaker 1: have the episodes to listen to and download there. We
Speaker 1: have transcripts. Now, we've got some folks helping us with
Speaker 1: transcripts again, so we've got transcripts on there. Also, we
Speaker 1: have research links for each episode, a couple of them
Speaker 1: per episode, on there. We also have the option on
Speaker 1: the right hand bar. We've still got merchandise available. We've
Speaker 1: added a bunch of merchandise, and we also have a
Speaker 1: couple of ways to donate to the show if you
Speaker 1: want to. This is totally optional, but there is the
Speaker 1: option of using Patreon, which is patreon dot com slash
Speaker 1: Thinking Sideways, which is a reoccurring donation per episode, totally
Speaker 1: totally up to you and not required in any way,
Speaker 1: shape or form. Or if you want to do one time,
Speaker 1: you can totally do that as well. That is available PayPal.
Speaker 1: Super appreciate you guys, have no idea how much that
Speaker 1: saved us. I do want to talk talk about the
Speaker 1: fact that everybody has probably figured out by now we're
Speaker 1: talking to you from the future. The future, but we
Speaker 1: have a bunch of issues with downloads in the past
Speaker 1: being slow or not working, and then we had the
Speaker 1: server problems and things were a giant mess and we
Speaker 1: got a lemon. We were sold a product that didn't work,
Speaker 1: and I apologize. But by the time this has come out,
Speaker 1: I've been working hours on end so far we've almost
Speaker 1: got it all squared away. Everything should be fine. Thank
Speaker 1: you for being patient. With us and at this point,
Speaker 1: if we've got it figured out right, which we never
Speaker 1: have this problem again, which we said last time. This
Speaker 1: time we have it on good authority from some other
Speaker 1: podcasts that people like that we listened to. Sometimes they're
Speaker 1: always asking why, Okay, let's move on to the other
Speaker 1: stuff that we've got here. You're gonna be listening to
Speaker 1: us through iTunes, Uh, some people are a lot of
Speaker 1: people are still doing that. You can find us on
Speaker 1: there if you do subscribe and leave a rating for
Speaker 1: iTunes and all other streaming sources. Our podcast fee did move,
Speaker 1: So if you are noticing issues with it not updating
Speaker 1: with the current stuff, and you see this stuff on
Speaker 1: social media on our website, you may have to unsubscribe
Speaker 1: and resubscribe because those things sometimes don't always catch the update.
Speaker 1: So just so you know that. But I said streaming,
Speaker 1: we're streaming on well just about everywhere you can stream
Speaker 1: at this point, So use whatever tool you want to use.
Speaker 1: And by the way, if you can review us on those,
Speaker 1: that'd be awesome. To wait a minute. On Twitter, we
Speaker 1: are on Twitter where you cannot stream us, but on
Speaker 1: Twitter we are thinking sideways. You can see some awesome
Speaker 1: memes and some tumbler stuff and also lots of pictures
Speaker 1: of trains, yes, and fake pictures of Devon. Devin Devin,
Speaker 1: I I'm Devin. I run the Twitter, so if you
Speaker 1: like me, you should follow us on Twitter suddenly turned
Speaker 1: into a population cut. You know, we hit We hit
Speaker 1: more than two thousand followers this past week. I didn't
Speaker 1: know that. Yeah, good job. Thank you all of your memes.
Speaker 1: I've actually started using the memes. I'm badly using them
Speaker 1: and I drive. The other places that you can see
Speaker 1: as used memes would be on Facebook. We have the
Speaker 1: Facebook page and the Facebook group. Uh so both of those.
Speaker 1: The page has a lot of stuck content. The group
Speaker 1: is where everybody gets together and does their discussions about
Speaker 1: different bits from episodes and just whatever we all find interesting.
Speaker 1: We have the ability to receive emails. The emails would
Speaker 1: come through Gmail because it is Thinking Sideways podcast at
Speaker 1: gmail dot com. You have feedback about an episode, do
Speaker 1: you have an episode suggestion, or you have questions or
Speaker 1: concerns about something, Please the immediate answers to send us
Speaker 1: an email and let's talk about it. Usually there's a
Speaker 1: very simple answer, rather than folks sometimes get upset and
Speaker 1: they will post a comments, comments on our website or
Speaker 1: things like iTunes, and then it's hard to have the
Speaker 1: conversation because they're buried in that massive stuff. So send
Speaker 1: us an first. We like talking to you. Also, don't
Speaker 1: forget we have a subreddit. We do. It's thinking Sideways,
Speaker 1: not Thinking sideways pod. Uh, you can find us. It's
Speaker 1: not super active, but there are episode discussions that happen sometimes,
Speaker 1: and the more users we get there, the more active
Speaker 1: it will be. So if you if you like, if
Speaker 1: you're a Reddit user, that's a place to hang out,
Speaker 1: and the more of you that are there, the more
Speaker 1: it's going to be active. It's like our Facebook page.
Speaker 1: That thing was super slow forever in a day, and
Speaker 1: then suddenly there was a whole group of people and
Speaker 1: now it's constantly busy. Someday I can't think of anything
Speaker 1: else that I have to tell anybody? Can you? Guys,
Speaker 1: I don't want to talk in ears anymore? Done? You
Speaker 1: don't want what talking to people's ears anymore? Okay? I
Speaker 1: can accept that. So Devin has done talking into your ear.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna go ahead and in the episode, uh
Speaker 1: so until next week. Woo stole my line everybody,