Well There's Your Problem | Episode 98: Penn Central (Part 1) 

42:58 "Lee went on to do PR for illustrious groups like Standard Oil, the DNC, Bethlehem Steel, and of course the National Socialist German Workers' Party" these sorts of deadpan Rocz deliveries are what I come back to this podcast for, please never change

As a business school grad I would also like to make the point that the curriculum heavily encourages a lack of empathy and abuse of your fellow man and the planet. One of the stories from one of my professors in Project Management involved a superfund site that he was the lead PM on that came in 6 months ahead of schedule and 10 million dollars under budget. What he won't tell you is that site is still poisoning many people which is statistically provable. He is proud of saving money for a private business, meanwhile thousands of people lives are made worse every day. Business school is evil learn trades instead. I am now happily self employed as a handy man and will never return to a corporate environment lest I treat the office much like that scene in wanted.

11:30 If you're gonna call 'em "wheelie bins" instead of "garbage cans", don't be surprised when they start doing sick-ass stunts. Nominative determinism at work.

No joke I've always thought that Alice has a really good podcasting voice. It's a distinct style and brand and it's great.

"I'm not in a great mood" perfect start to a... I'm going to assume 6 hour podcast that's split in two.

“The office of President of the Pennsylvania Railroad killed anyone who took it.” I guess you might call that a terminal station in life.

hell yeah team we did it, longer than every individual Marvel Cinematic Universe film. Great job gang.

I'm glad you decided against ranking all of your previous guests by the sound of their sweet podcast voice. ... because they would all be angry at me when I won.

“He wrote his Death Poem on a Stock Certificate” such a good line.

Your discussion of coupling car technology in the 1960s reminds me of my uncle who worked in a rail yard in Arkansas at that time. He was working in a train yard and was working underneath a flat car when someone decided to couple that car while he was still working, unknown to him. He got lucky. He pulled one of his legs off the track, unfortunately he lost the other below the knee. He has worn a prosthetic leg ever since. He still gets around on it at age 89. He worked his whole life doing manual labor on a prosthetic leg. He also liked to freak people out with it. He once "tripped" in a whole in the trail and screamed "They've got me! They've got me!" and fell forward with his leg unfastened and crawled towards my cousins and I... Leg missing below the knee...

I was in London during this "Storm" and I've got to say it was pretty overrated. They just need to make England more rigid.

"When a cat is dropped, it always lands on its feet, and when toast is dropped, it always lands with the buttered side facing down. I propose to strap buttered toast to the back of a cat; the two will hover, spinning, inches above the ground. With a giant buttered-cat array, a high-speed monorail could easily link New York and Chicago." -John Frazee, The Journal of Irreproducible Results Sorry I stumbled across this quote and swore I would copy pasta it on your next train episode sight-unseen 🚂

For baiting Alice: "This structure was so flexible and malleable. It was a major issue. But no one could figure out how to deal with it. Oh well."

"So it just so happened that someone in the meeting was a double agent for Pan Am" is possibly the juiciest thing I've heard on this podcast in a hot minute

I love it when my podcast about engineering disasters is interupted by a corporate spy thriller starring all your favorite gilded age corporate actors fighting over a worthless airline in the 1960s

>three hour runtime >(part 1) NOW **THIS** IS PODCASTING

The toilet flush on mic with no effort to edit it out after the fact really just solidifies that this podcast will forever spiritually remain in the wild west days of the internet when the entirety of content was just some dudes who got together with a DV Cam and the majority of podcasts were just made with Garage Band and a dream. At this point I would probably be upset if a competent producer cleaned up this beautiful mess :D

10:20 About storm Eunice. In 1999 me and my school buddies in France were like the second year of kids who didn't need to do 2 years of mandatory service in the army. Instead, we only had to show up for a single "citizen day" at a military base, where an officer who couldn't give a single f*ck would give us like a literacy test and a civic education sermon before sending us home. But you know: it was a single day to replace two years we had all been thinking all our lives we most definitely would have to do, so that day still felt SUPER important. But my buddy had a problem: the day before his day they announced on TV that there was going to be storm Lothar. a storm like we had never seen, something historical. So the morning after he prepared really early, and he went to take the train. He had to hold himself to the walls to be able to walk, and he was blown away a few times, while also avoiding all sort of debris that were flying through the streets and potted plants falling from the windows. Eventually he made it to the military base, where he rang a long time until a soldier came, who found him holding to the gate for dear life. When he made it inside, a bunch of soldiers told him what a dumb, stupid motherf*cker he was, so f*cking dumb that he was literally the only guy to show up of like 3 or 4 hundreds who were supposed to be there that day. Only the officer seemed impressed: he told him that if there ever was a proof that he was made for the army, that was it (his gay, anarchist ass was utterly unconvinced). Long story short: the train he had taken was about the last one to run the line that day and some electric cables fell later, which meant he had to spend the night at the base. And then reconvene to come back at a later date to do his "citizen day" with all the others. Turns out the wind went as fast as 150 km/h that day (about 90 m/h). France basically stopped cutting wood for like 7 or 8 years after that, that's how much trees fell on that day.

'Warrior's Heart' but the ICC he's singing about is the Interstate Commerce Commission instead of the International Criminal Court.

Three hours, three parts, FUCK YES. We can now link the episodes together and make a podcast train, the highest form of podcast.

My mom named her cats after railroads. She had Chessie (see my icon) and Denver, but her favorite was Erie Lackawanna.

The biggest and best railcar theft scheme from this time was perpetrated by an Illinois short line called the LaSalle & Bureau County. Their reporting mark was LSBC, or "Let's Steal Boxcars".

Penn Central. What I Expected: Death by Privatization, truck, and anti competitive economics What I Got: The Curse of Protestantism, Fraud, Corporate Espionge, sex scandals, Goons, a failing not-airline, PINKERTONS

Roz is great because his monotone delivery makes me think I'm back in school and need to take notes.

Alice's "I do speak German!" was a satisfying conclusion to the Liam character arc. She will now be marched in front of a ZSU-23-4 after Jay. But the gun crew set the convergence so far that all four streams of 23mm Cannon shells miss Jay and Alice and somehow hit Penn Station.

Alice's comment about the Railroad Marriage being a marriage you'd have a Mountain Goats song about is a thing of beauty. What a galaxy brain thought.

Alice you have a beautiful podcasting voice, don’t let pesky internalized negative thoughts bring you down, we all love you. Yay Liam and also Yay Alice

As a Southwest Ohioan, WTYP slamming the blatant ref interference in favor of the Rams is validating AF, and I agree, it is in many ways Middle America's 9/11. The Bengals winning the superbowl could have cured Ohio's depression for like a year at least.

love it when the 3 hour episode is part 1

Roz waking up: *Slaps roof of podcast* "This baby can handle 3 hour episodes like a champ."

Something I'll throw out Re: Matt Farah and his burnt Porsche (lol) is that on his pod he has talked about it a little, he's basically bummed he has to wait even longer for it (he's been waiting since like August or some shit) and is just happy nobody got hurt cuz cars are replaceable. He's a pretty good dude tbh, probably one of the most left leaning car journos out there today which is a fuckin miracle in that field lol I also wanna go raid that boat for some fucking engines holy shit

Liam flushing his toilet at us should become a recurring segment.

I'm with you all about not being in a great mood. I have COVID for the fucking second time and it's going nearly as poorly as before despite the vaccine (although I'm hoping I'll at least either get better more quickly or die quickly this time) and I have my goddamn period on top of that (which would explain why my immune system was lowered enough for me to actually get sick). I also agree with Liam that Alice is gorgeous! Hope you can get the pain in your tooth taken care of. Something that my dentist told me when I was a physic fail kid and accidentally dropped a giant jawbreaker from Disneyland on my front teeth was that you can crush up pain killer, sprinkle it on a piece of gum, and use the gum to stick the powdered pain reliever directly to your broken tooth. He had no way to taking care of my broken tooth for two days and this method worked really well for that time. Anyway, hope you feel better soon.

When Alice said "I'm not gonna make that joke," I thought to myself, "but Liam probably would". All members of the podcast are vital! Anyways, more planes than I thought there would be in this train company episode.

The podcast where they don't drift off topic, they drift onto it.

Talking about trains? Over 3 hours long and it’s only part 1? Did I die in that tunnel fire last week, and this is heaven?

"No one wants to fight a pitched battle over a failing not-airline" has me laughing so hard I'm crying...

This is the best engineering podcast with slides on RU-vid by far

A small part of me hopes one of yous guys might actually read this unimportant comment Finally a new episode of my favourite podcast dropped. what with me recently realizing that i have severe depression you guys are among the things that keep me from loosing my mind. i know i shouldnt do a parasocial, but you guys and this podcast have me looking forward to something between periods of feeling miserable. Be it Rocz being chill and just wanting to talk about interesting stuff, Alice derrailing the conversation and being funny, and Liam (yay liam!) going on those rants every now and then, you guys not only keep me from going off the deep end, but your podcast also is what turned me into a full blown leftist and made me learn to reflect on major social issues that prior to that would just have blown past me. I almost never leave a review to anything so the fact that your Pod managed to get me to write this novel of a text means a lot and i wish every one of you, despite how shitty things are at the moment, a wonderfull day and salutations. Rock on you wonderfull people!

35:00 dah fuck, APUSH just skipped Tom Scott's involvement in the end of Reconstruction, probably because it comes very out of left field and that aspect is limited in scope. But it's insane to think that the end of reconstruction was the result of a scheme set in motion by a train guy

The storm destroyed our local big tree in Bude, in the town square. Came right down. That tree was 150 years old. Practically a landmark. Everyone in the area's been heartbroken by it. Used to hang Christmas decorations from it every year. There's talk of making a bench to put there in memory of it, presumably from the poor thing's corpse.

Conrail Disptacher and CSX Locomotive Engineer Rodney Kantorski, would be an excellent guest for Part Three. He's the GREATEST FAN of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

"The law of salvage is a principle of maritime law whereby any person who helps recover another person's ship or cargo in peril at sea is entitled to a reward commensurate with the value of the property salved." In practice such things are a little more complicated that just "FRIST!"

Regarding business school: I simultaneously studied mechanical engineering and business in school (don't worry, I dropped out of all of it) but I remember taking differential equations at the same time I took some business classes and at one point the business class teacher was like "okay we're going to do some equations but don't freak out", and then proceeded to write "Revenue - Cost = Profit" and all the students are either moaning or diligently taking notes. And I was thinking "That's not an equation, that's arithmetic." Anyway, fake school for joke people is right.

"swashbucklers on my dinghy" sounds **very** suggestive

1:33:55 That's the one thing you *need* to have to run a railway: A great track record.

When I was 19, living in a state that wasn't too keen on workers comp, I was hammering stakes for horse stalls. I misaimed my swing, tore the flesh on the knuckles down to the tendon sheeth. I showed my supervisor, and he gave me a leather glove filled with tissues. He then showed me how to drives stakes with one hand and had me finish my shift.

I know a lot of stuff and I'm good at a lot of things. Still, I don't know if I'll ever reach the level of Justin around 1:40:00 explaining how moving goods by train works in the US by sketching train routes over, not a US map, but a still of a cartoon train yard. I love this podcast.

Well, its wednesday 8.15 pm just finished a Dostojevski book which makes me feel like a 19th century anarchist ready to blow up a factory, its wtyppod to the rescue. Oh wait its 3 hrs long and dear Alice is not in a great mood. *proceeds to listen*

This is just beautiful. It's bringing together aspects for all of the past 97 episodes. This is the Avengers Endgame of WTYP. And though I of course hope the series continues for many more episodes, if this really is the grand finale, I couldn't think of a better way to say farewell.

Um watcha got there? Pennsylvania Railroad: (stocks guns in train station) a smoothie

I love how we can have nice things, like this podcast, not Penn Central.

@1:57:48 I have long dreamed of a mod called “Capitalist Kings II” about American industry in the gilded age for exactly this reason, I’m glad you share my fantasy

"Pennsylvania goes all the way to Nebraska," makes sense if you side with the original state borders that claimed some of the western borders of those states went all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The people in NYC being pissy about Upstaters in Albany being clueless, would have nothing on people in San Francisco being pissy about Eaststaters in Richmond.

Oh God, please don't end the podcast on the 100th episode. I'm scared. :(

A 10-hour session about three guys and their obsession with Pennsylvania railroad system. And Alice.

2:49:25 Quick aside but in regards to Linda Vaughn and Hurst Performance, whose legacy has had a impact on the motorsports and our society as a whole. First off, Hurst Performance is known of two different products, the first being their brand of gear shifters, the hurst shifter which have became a classic mainstay design in the world of muscle cars. As well of a inotivate hydraulic-extrication rescue tool which would become a mainstay in use by firefighters and rescue personally worldwide, the "Jaws of Life". In addition, Linda Vaughn herself is a significant figure in the world of Motorsports as the "First Lady of Motorsports" and is one of the few women to leave a impact on the world of motorsports.

Every podcast host here has a voice I find enjoyable and appealing. No more, no less. Pissed is also a mood right now for me, so take that as reinforcement. Good day

I love Liam's "That's 1200-1500 miles, right?" in the background at 28:16 - good job flexing the fact you just learned on the DonkCast.

56:28 Cairo, IL wikipedia: 1 History 1.1 Beginnings 1.2 Post-war prosperity 1.3 Lynchings 1.4 Economic decline 1.5 Racial tensions and further decline 1.6 Current status Sounds fun.

Excuse me, a THREE PART EPISODE? It's already 3 hours and that's just PART ONE! Amazing.

THREE parts? Finally, the WTYP full-body experience we've been waiting for 👌

Ah yes, Bsquiklehausen, the only person with an equally impressive cities skylines upload schedule as Donoteat!

3:11 PART 1 That's what I am here for. Ranting of train fans about a train company for half a day. Let's go!

When Alice starts talking about sexy voices and I suddenly realize how sexy her voice is... Why did you do this to me?

Welcome to ‘Well there’s your problem’ a podcast about engineering disasters, with slides. I’m Justin Roczniak, the person who’s talking right now; my pronouns are he and him. Okay go! I’m Alice Caldwell-Kelly, the person who is talking now; my pronouns are she/ her. Yay Liam! Yay Liam! I’m Liam Anderson, the person who is talking now. My pronouns are he/him.

"I'm not in a great mood" big friggin same, Alice

Toothache treatment: Brush teeth with salt paste. Wash out salty mouth and spit with choice of grain alcohol, 80 proof. (Extra alcohol taken internally, optional) Then get anti-sensitivity toothpaste and go see a dentist asap. Feel better, Alice ❤️

"England got it worse than Scotland" About fookin time.

Need a 10hr loop of Liam saying "Sieze It"

In my high school shop class for our final exam we watched the Stallone classic "Over The Top" as my shop teacher had a brief appearance in it as an extra.

The Goddamn News on the next one is gonna be fukken WILD.

Man, a The Smoking Tire/WTYPP is the crossover I didn’t know I needed, but now want.

Does anyone else unironically think that a Paradox style railroad grand strategy game would actually be incredible? Railroad tycoon with heavy doses of Rails Across America and Crusader Kings in other words...

Welcome to Well There’s Your Problem, it’s a podcast about American football, with slides

2:55:40 Bevin logic is actually genius so that he won't let anyone blackmail him except himself.

It’s MY sleepover and I get to decide what series we watch…

The Unofficial Playlist: ru-vid.com/group/PLyXq6Z6VI4euOOJBXOKC4bT6665OsTsX6 Contains every WTYP in order.

2:53:08 The more things change the more they stay the same. Reminds me of Pitchford of Gearbox infamy losing a usb drive of questionable porn+gearbox company (on the same drive!) info at a "Medieval Time" family buffet.

9:50 They're not smoke machines, it's just 5 people vaping on the bridge and blowing it out the windows.

First slide: love how in the painting of the riot, there's just some dude walking his dog seemingly oblivious to the chaos around him.

Yess, 3 hours, part one, I'm ready for the (good) torture

oh yeah heck yeah can't wait to get into this one I've been super interested in Penn Central/Conrail for a while and ended up reading two books about it to explore the counterfactuals and the conclusion I got was: Within a market that was fundamentally shrinking outside the control of Penn Central, they were actually stuck between a rock and a hard place as inflation pushed their costs up and a politicized ICC refused to let them cut services and raise rates proportionately to the shrinking of the market and the cost augmentations. Massive mismanagement and corruption didn't help either, and it's arguably what's responsible for a massive initial overbuilding and duplication of services between the parent lines. The nationalization gave the excuse to bypass the ICC and cut the massively overduplicated network down to the demand that was remaining after the flight of the industry to the south and the rising market share of the unfairly subsidized highways. A process that, lacking a cogent industrial transpo policy on the national stage, proved to be the only playbook that could salvage railroads within a managed decline that is broadly speaking not really their fault. For all I know that could be a bunch of neolib propaganda. I don't have time to listen just now, leaving it here for now and very interested to see how the pod lays it out!

train thumbnail → ohshit Penn Central → O.O "3:11:37" → *squealing* "Part 1" → *screaming*

When you start the video and immediately hit like cuz your real friends are finally visiting again 🙃

Alice, don’t feel bad. As a fellow trans woman, I actually ADORE your voice.

Alice, we have to talk. Do not ever feel bad for marketing guys. If they made a logo that no one gets, they get sent to the gulag on the edge of the habitable zone, gluing rocks back together using water they're not allowed to drink, until the end of their days.

Alice has a face for video and a voice for podcasting, best of both worlds imo.

I had a similar experience in shop class. I was sanding a box top on a belt sander. When my top slipped through the crack between the belt and the platform I suddenly saw red stuff on the ground. The shop teacher wasn't happy. Luckily I only got a deep abrasion and small scar.

no speedometers because if you don't know how fast you're going you can't be fined for speeding

As a B&O fan, I'm surprised you guys didn't touch on how the state of PA screwed over the B&O since they wanted to build to Pittsburgh first. The original B&O mainline was to go to Pittsburgh, but was rerouted to go to Wheeling because the state of PA didn't want to have Baltimore become a more important port than Philadelphia. The state of PA blocked the B&O from building into Pittsburgh but not allowing them to build in PA.

My obscure knowledge is finally paying dividends. Vehicles are generally declared hazardous as per UN3166 (fuel/gas-powered) or UN3171 (battery-powered), except when declared as SP961 in which case the batteries are disconnected and engines ran until the vehicle stalls. In both cases the batteries will still remain in the vehicle.

The deeply problematic teacher sticker wouldn't be a punisher logo, it would be a Mr. Terrific FAIRPLAY sticker.

The "Yuessssssss" I screamed out when I saw a three hour (part 1).... we're sickos this week, eh?

2:25:17 I imagined this as two parents fighting while a kid is distracted by his train set. Maybe I need therapy.

>3 hours >part 1 this is why i love this podcast

Laughter over "Uncovering such a rich vein of Weird Guys!" healed my soul XD

3 hours and it's part 1? I'm *pointy as hell* right now. Yay Liam for embarassing your SO!

If I couldn’t see the length before clicking on the video, I think I could still guess its runtime reasonably well based on whether or not it starts with one of the hosts saying they’re in an awful mood and not ready to spend the next several hours talking.

I wonder if Liam's "the railroad can't mess up baptisms" comment was a reference to the recent scandals involving Catholic baptisms that were held to be invalid because the priest/deacon said "We baptise you" instead of "I baptise you". In fact, in 2020 there was a priest in Michigan, Father Matthew Hood, who was watching a video of his baptism as a baby and learned that it was invalid because of this - which meant that his ordination was also invalid, which meant that the Masses, confessions and weddings he'd celebrated as a priest were all also invalid! It was a complete mess. All because of one wrong word.