The Day's Dumpster Fire
In this podcast, Kara and Ed regale history's greatest mess ups. They do not celebrate humanity's successes but its most fantastic failures! This show is not dedicated to those who have accomplished incredible things, but to those who have accomplished incredible things and how they royally screwed things up in the process.
You might ask why they are doing this podcast: it's because you've botched up the best laid plans and you know what? THAT'S OKAY!
Let this show help you navigate the mishaps that you have come across where there is no clear answer available.
So sit back, relax, and listen about people who messed up way more than what you could of possibly imagine.
The Day's Dumpster Fire
The Great Train Wreck of 1918 - Episode 74
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Ed's by himself today so he's got the entire episode for himself to do as he pleases. Kara is on vacation and that means Ed can do whatever type of episode he wants so what could possibly go wrong?
As a result of Kara being vacation, Ed decided to do and episode themed off nothing else done before in The Day's Dumpster Fire history. and episode dedicated to one of the worst train accidents in American history.
What was supposed to be a normal July 9, 1918, early morning train ride for folks coming in from Memphis TN to Nashville and folks coming out of Nashville TN heading to Memphis, two trains collided just a little way outside of Nashville on a blind turn called "Dutchman's Curve." This collision marked the worst train collision in US history and took the lives of over 101 men, women, and children. Furthermore, about 80% of the people who died that day were African Americans who were trying to head to a munitions factory for work.
In this episode, Ed will nerd out on some cool facts about how steam engines work and why they dominated the mass transit system of the 1800s and early 1900s. He will also dig into the litany of safety issues that resulted in the disfigurement of many railroad workers if they didn't end up dying doing their jobs. Next Ed will describe the geography of where the collision took place as well as the two trains involved. He'll explain how the accident took place, who or what was at fault and what Ed thinks is the real culprit behind this terrible accident.
It's not what you think! So, you better sit down and listen. You might just learn some math along the way.
Of course, if you disagree with Ed's theories or want to add your own be sure to email Kara and Ed at thedaysdumpsterfire@gmail.com come.
Check out the website and send a text if you want. This is not your typical dumpster fire, and it invites the community to chip in their theories.
Hey before you go!
If have ideas for future episodes that you want Kara and Ed to look into, email them at thedaysdumpsterfire@gmail.com. They would love to hear from you!
You can also send them a text message by clicking on the link at the top.
Be sure to head on over to www.thedaysdumpsterfire.com for the ever growing library of historical dumpster fires.
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Hey everybody, got some bad news for you. We are without Kara for this episode. Sounds like uh she's one of those few people out there that actually likes taking a vacation and um she's not afraid to not work for a week, where I am the kind of person that has to work 80 hours a week in order to feel like I can function. So it's a very selfish move, I know, leaving me here alone with all of you, but wish her luck on her travels, and while she's traveling, I figured you and I could uh have a little fun together. And I was thinking of let's have fun with some math because what else have you got going on right now, other than a good math problem? So hear me out. This is one of these math problems that will probably cause some PTSD from elementary and junior high and even high school. Um, when you when you hear this math problem, it'll probably uh uh make you very um upset with me. So train A and train B are traveling toward a station from two different cities. Train A departs City X, which is 180 miles away from the station, traveling at a constant speed of 60 miles per hour. Train B departs from city Y, which is 150 miles away from the station, traveling at a constant speed of 50 miles per hour. Both trains start their journeys at the same time. My question to you is how long will it take for both trains to arrive at the station? Will they arrive at the same time or at different times? If a if at different times, which train arrives first and by how many minutes? Got all that? Cool. Because there's gonna be a test at the end. Actually, there won't be, but maybe. Oh, and let's add one other fun twist to this uh this little math problem here. Both trains are sharing the same track. Oh, and these two trains are heading towards each other. Got all that? Cool. We look at moments in human history where we think we have planned out everything so that nothing could go wrong. And then shortly after implementing that plan, it all falls to pieces. And more importantly, we try to figure out what life lessons can be learned from all that. Because let's face it, we are all adrift in a sea of dumpster fires. I mean, just turn on the news and you and you can see what I mean. So I am your host, Ed. Normally, Kara is with me. So, like I mentioned before, she's on vacation. She decided to take some time off because she only works like full time, and then she's only going to school like almost full-time, and then she's got the podcast, which is like another full-time job, and she has like 76 dogs, they're more like four, but still full-time. So her and her husband are taking a much, much needed vacation, traveling the countryside, enjoying cooler weather, and um probably just enjoying the fact that uh she's doing something more interesting right now. Today's episode is a uh it's a it's a digression from what we normally have done. In fact, I don't think we've ever done an episode like this before. Uh, in the past, we look at everything from you know inventions that have gone wrong. We've looked at, you know, sinking of ships, a lot of sinking of ships. Seems like those are just inherent dumpster fires. Uh, we've looked at like battles that gone horribly awry, cities that burned to the ground, uh, banks that got a ton of money stolen from them. But one thing that we have yet to have covered on on our little show here are train crashes. And I'm surprised that we haven't done this before. And by extension, plane crashes too. I'm sure that's a it's a matter of time before we start covering those. But yeah, we've never actually covered a train crash before because it it's strange that if you really think about a train crash, that is like ultimate dumpster fire, right? There, it's one of those things where trains work great until they crash, and then holy cow, it is a colossal mess to sort through and to figure out. And yeah, there's just something about trains, man, that when you see those aerial views on the news, you're just like, Thank God I'm not in the middle of that. Thank God I wasn't actually in the train, and thank God I'm not having to be one of the people that has to try to clean all that up. When you see all those cars lying all over the place and whatnot, I I just have no idea where you even begin. Today's episode, we are gonna go back in time. Seeing how this is a history podcast, it makes sense that we go back in time. And uh, we're gonna go back to a year that is very near and dear to my heart, 1918. And uh, I like this year because that was the year that my grandfather was born, and it was also like the year of like World War I coming to an end. It was a year of uh the Spanish flu, which is like, dude, that that that's like a pre-COVID thing. The Spanish flu was a massive, massive mess. And we may actually do an episode on the Spanish flu because you will see a lot of the uh same arguments, the same politics, the same uh skepticism of treatment and all that stuff. You're gonna see all that same stuff happen in 1918 as it did in 2020 and then 2021, and even to this day. So, yeah, we're going back to 1918. We're venturing over to Nashville, Tennessee, and we are heading into July, July 9th, 1918. So, yeah, we're going back in time to Tennessee for this wonderful incident, and it is what's eloquently known as the Great Train Wreck of 1918. And the reason why I'm bringing this episode up is because it is a unique time where we have like um Jim Crow laws meets World War One, meets an explosion of technology, meeting an explosion of demand for the war effort, and econom the economy like asking more and more and more of the people of the time. And yet, yeah, 19 the the late 1910s is a very unique time period in American history where I think America for the first time was kind of like stepping out on its own. You've got some little stuff in like the late 1890s and and whatnot, but America in World War One was finally put to task of like making its presence known, right? 1800s has always been the time period of what is America's identity, right? America was like a teenager during the 1800s, it really didn't do too much in the outside world to uh any great effect or you know, splashing the water, so to speak. But in the early 1900s, America is kind of like uh, you know, like a 19, 20-year-old person moving out on their own, and now it's interacting with the rest of the world, and it caused a lot of change and a lot of growing up. And this train crash, just outside Nashville, Tennessee, really kind of uh combines all of that together, and it's it, yeah, it's strange how a train crash can can do something like that. So let's start with part one. Well, I mean, where else are we gonna start? I mean, I guess we could kill Billet and like start at the last chapter and then go to the middle chapter and then go to the first chapter and then go back to the last chapter. But uh, I'm not Quentin Tarantino, and I have zero writing skills in that regard to actually make that make sense. So, part one is the tractive effort. Now, each part here, the titles are pertaining to terminology that you would find in working in the railroad industry. So, like every industry, they have their own jargon, their own way of putting things. Um, in in this case, part one tractive effort, which is basically what can a train haul? Like what is its its potential? I don't think there is ever a piece of technology in American history that changed the landscape, both figuratively and literally, quite like the steam powered railroad engine or the locomotive. Uh, today we call them trains, but yeah, back then they were locomotives and uh there were no there was no diesel engines and stuff like that. So these things were all powered by steam. Invented in 1804, the steam-powered engine invented in 1804, steam-powered trains were the main movers of goods and people from one end of the country to the other. Yeah, this goes all the way back to England. They're the ones that kind of started all this, and England seems fitting because they were the ones that were sitting on this massive, massive pile of coal that would essentially change the entire trajectory of England in the 1800s, going into the 1900s, even like 1950s, if you really think about it. For them to have that much coal, cool, like they can really capitalize on steam. And America isn't a whole lot different. Uh, America is sitting on some of the largest energy reserves in the world. So, hey, why not take the advantage of steam? They're so influential that during the times of war in Europe and America, the railroad, or the rail for short, uh, became integral strategic points of interest for competing armies. Basically, those who control the rail lines had a huge advantage logistically. You can look at the American Civil War as that. I think it was Ulysses S. Grant before he was in charge of the Union Army. One of his tasks in the first half of the war was to try to take over the rail lines to keep the Confederacy from utilizing them. And uh, because yeah, if you if you had those rail lines and you could lock in moving massive amounts of supplies and troops and whatnot, uh from the north to the south or or whatever. So, yeah, it's a uh back then the rail lines were a absolutely crucial part of the geopolitics of of a country. The key to the success of the steam-powered locomotive, well, it's water. It's uh it's a pretty boring thing to think about. Uh, we don't think it is anything terribly exciting, right? You may have a glass of water sitting next to you and it's just sitting there doing nothing. But water is strange chemically in that it it contains or it can contain a massive amount of energy. And that energy is you you see that when it comes about in the form of steam, then that that power comes about. So if you take one cubic foot of water, so think of a cube, it's like you know, one foot by one foot by one foot. Uh, and you take that one cubic foot of water and you heat it to the point where it turns into steam, that one cubic foot will turn into 1,700 cubic feet of steam. So, in other words, when you turn water into steam, it will magnify its volume of space by 1700. And uh that that that volume of space isn't easily contained. So, whenever you have steam, you have immense, immense power. And that's because steam is a water vapor, it's a gas. And whenever you have a gas, uh the particles or the molecules want to avoid each other, like they repel each other, and water does actually like to stick to itself, like the H2O molecule wants to stick to itself, but when it's got so much heat and energy to it, they actually kind of don't they don't like each other, and so they expand, and that expansion can be harnessed, and in in you know, the what everybody wants to hear in physics class, that steam can be put to work. Uh, that work in physics is any sort of energy that can be utilized to accomplish something. So instead of just having raw energy sit there, you can take steam and you can run it through a piston, which will then force this piston back, which can then be used to turn a crank or a camshaft, and then you can also take some of that same steam, push it in through behind the piston, and now it moves the piston forward, and as a result, it will now keep turning that wheel. So imagine that piston just going back and forth, back and forth, over and over and over again. You can use that to turn a wheel. And since Steam, like if if you ever uh seen that episode of Mythbusters where they tested the uh hot water uh malfunction, where what they did is they took a like a 50-gallon water heater. Yeah, it's ironic because my water heater just went out at my house and I've been taking freezing cold showers this entire time. But whenever you take a water heater and you disable like the burst discs, right, the the safety valves, and you basically turn these 50 gallons of water into a tank that is completely sealed off with no exit, and then you heat that thing up to a couple hundred degrees, that water wants to expand, and it will keep building pressure and pressure and pressure until something breaks in that that water tank. And yeah, the videos are crazy. You can probably find them on YouTube. Um, maybe I'll maybe I'll have some links in the uh the show notes for you. But like these water tanks and these heaters would burst through like their makeshift house, fly through the ceiling, and go up in the air like a hundred plus feet. And that's that's just a single tank of water. Uh, when you can harness that and you can put it to work turning wheels and whatnot, uh yeah, you now have a uh you have a mechanism that has a lot of power. So, how much power are we talking about? Well, let's put things into perspective here. An automobile in the 1910s had about 10 to 30 horsepower. Yeah, yeah, that's uh uh I think I can walk faster than that. Well, not really. I think the top speeds of those cars back then were like in their 30s. So uh maybe downhill, falling downhill, chasing a donut, I could probably get up to that speed. Uh an industrial traction engine, you know, so that's where the term like a tractor comes from. A traction engine for farming could range from 30 to 100 horsepower. And if you ever see one of those things in real life, they're super, super cool because they're running off of like a uh what's known as a hit and miss engine. So they have a piston, like one big piston that fires once every few seconds. And what it does is it turns this gigantic flywheel that weighs like a thousand pounds, and that that momentum of that flywheel is what you can use to power a lot of things. And they're yeah, they're pretty crazy because they don't go very fast, but yeah, they sound like something that's gonna fall apart or explode at at any moment. So yeah, 30 to 100 horsepower, okay. That that's that's something. Okay. Uh a steam locomotive engine could range between 1,000 to 3,000 horsepower. All right, now we're talking because your standard issue four-cylinder internal combustion engine, which is probably I think the most commonly built engine today, can range from between 130 to 230 horsepower. Yeah, I I know that there are like uh other types of engines out there that are like super, super modified that can do like a thousand horsepower. Those are exceptions to the norm and they're not very uh useful long term. But to kind of upscale a little bit more, the other type of engine that we see a lot of today is an eight-cylinder engine. And for most commercial applications or even private use, an eight-cylinder engine can get around 400 to 1,000 horsepower. Think of these giant steam engines from the late 1800s. Uh they're producing more power than an eight-cylinder uh like diesel today. Uh, now granted that I mean it it yeah, um admittedly we should probably factor in that how are you converting that energy into work? What sort of transmission are you running it through and all that stuff? But I'm not here to put you guys asleep. Uh if Kara was here, then yes, I would be going down the next 45 minutes of like different transmissions and gear ratios and stuff like that. Um, but since she's not here, I'm gonna spare you all that because well, I'm jealous that she's vacationing and I'm not. Um so uh yeah, an eight-cylinder engine, 400 to a thousand horsepower. And yes, there are cars out there that run off of like nitromethane, right? Like those top fuel drag racers, and those things are hitting between like 10 and 13,000 horsepower. Okay, those are only good for a quarter mile at a time before the whole engine has to be rebuilt. Um, so we got to factor in longevity. The amount of energy a locomotive steam engine could output is known as tractive effort. Needless to say, steam-powered locomotives uh or locomotive engines could pack a lot of power. Granted, I think an internal combustion engine is a lot more efficient today, right? You can have a eight-cylinder diesel engine pulling or putting out like a thousand horsepower, but if you look at the size of that compared to a steam engine, it's like a fraction of the size, and it doesn't need a track, you know. A truck can really go anywhere. Furthermore, as long as there was enough coal to keep these things lit, because that was the other thing, is like an engine today, you turn it on, you turn it off. Uh, back then the steam engines took a long time to heat up and it to keep them running, as long as they had a constant supply of coal, yeah, they they they could stay up and running 24-7, right? They because I think they would have like hundreds, if not thousands, of gallons of water inside of them, and to heat all that water up would take a long time. So back in the day, it was just easier to just keep feeding coal into these things and just keep them running all the time. You're also one of those types of engines that prefers to be running, whereas as soon as they stop running, then like that's where you start getting rust and really weird wear and tear and and all that fun stuff. So yeah, let's just keep these things up and running. It wasn't uncommon for steam engines to stay running all the time, even when they weren't being used uh for whatever reason to say they're on standby. Yeah, they just kept a coal at a minimum, but yeah, they kept them, kept them pretty much um heated up. Uh obviously, when they were being worked on, they would have to drain the water and and all that stuff. There wasn't really any stainless steel at that time, so rust was a factor, and that was something that they had to keep in mind. Uh the last thing they need is the engine to pit out and then explode. That would be a bad deal for everybody involved. And now that I think of it, I really didn't see a lot of examples of these steam engines exploding back then. Granted, most of my experience with steam engines comes from watching the third Back to the Future movie, where the whole, you know, last act of the movie takes place on a train, like a steam train. So if you want an accurate representation of exactly how they worked back then, yeah, back to the future, man, all the way. Just don't quote me on that. Quote somebody else. So the 1800s witnessed the dawn of the steam engine and subsequent locomotives. By the 1860s and 1870s, trains became so prevalent that the rail maps look like a like a network of varicose veins on some old lady's leg on the countryside. You can look at these old maps, and they make no sense because it's just a web of trains, and each one of these rail lines was owned by like a different person or a different company. And uh, yeah, basically people would uh like this is where Vanderbilt comes from, buy certain segments of train track and and all that. It was a wild, wild economic uh situation at the time. So in America in the 1830s, so let's let's look at how many miles of track was being used at any given time. Uh, in America in the 1830s, a whopping 23 miles of railroad was in use. It's safe to say that it was just being implemented in the states at that time. By the 1860s, there was over 30,000 miles used across the nation. I mean, we're talking about a country that's like what 3,000 miles wide, so that's a lot of miles. By the 1890s, so 30 years later, there was over 190,000 miles in use, and then by 1918, so that's the time that our dumpster fire takes place. There was over 250,000 miles in use. I think it's safe to say that America liked trains back then. Strange because we don't really hear about them too much today. Um, other than when they stop traffic to go through an intersection and it takes them like a half hour to get through because we've all been there. The rail system only became more of a necessity when America got into World War One, so like 1916, 1917, World War One was like the largest war the world had ever seen to date, and America's involvement forced the country to scale up in many different industries that it was not expecting. So, like, yeah, go check out it was episode 14, the Boston Molasses Flood. Same exact thing there. That was a perfect example of America having to expand out in ways that it never thought that it'd ever need to. Like, let's expand our molasses production because that can be used to make alcohol, not necessarily for drinking, but for making explosives. Yeah. America had to really retrofit and really change its way of doing things during World War I because now it was a global player and it needed to produce a lot. The need for war-related items such as guns, bullets, shells, and explosives and whatnot. Oh, look at that. I have a note here for episode 14. That's that's awesome. And more importantly, the country needed bodies to man factories and make things, as well as also go to war across the ocean and do soldiery thingies. Men were flocking to the cities, and yet industries, especially like the ones that made explosives, they were moving to the countryside. It makes sense, right? Last thing you want is having a Costco-sized munitions factory in the middle of your capital city or whatever. Because if that building were to go off, gone. Like everything is gone. Um in fact, we we we just had an incident um out east where a uh immunitions company exploded. Growing up as a kid, I grew up in a retirement community and I knew some women, uh, very, very old women, and they worked in factories where they would make bullets, and women were really a good candidate for this because they had smaller hands with the better dexterity for manufacturing bullets. And uh yeah, they had pictures back then where like they're just smoking a cigarette while they're pouring like gunpowder into shells. Uh, to me, that's just wild because if anything were to go off, you know, that whole facility would be erased from the map in less than a second. Vastly, vastly different time. So uh the the main munitions factories, they kind of, you know, for good reason, they moved out to the countryside. And therefore, a lot of workers were one flocking to inside the city for factory jobs, but then others were flocking to the outsides of the country looking for work in like munitions factories. Uh, prime example were African Americans, right? Uh, the wages were really good, so the pay was good. And if they could just get out there away from everything, so the transit was kind of far, if they could just get out there, man, they can make some really good money. So, like, we're gonna see that uh the African-American community is they're traveling a lot further than what they're used to, and uh the idea of all these people, like massive amounts of people needing to get from point A to point B became really crucial, and that's where trains came in. So the trains had to ramp up their efficiency, their productivity, and whatnot. The demand was getting pretty insane, and the demand for commuter trains was also growing. So trains would do two things back then, they would obviously haul large volumes of really, really heavy things, and then they were also hauling uh leathery bags of water, i.e., human beings, from point A to point B. So, like instead of having a train that would just be a commuter train, and then you would have a train that would just do uh goods, uh, you would have a train that some cars would be hauling people, some cars would be hauling uh mail, and other cars could be hauling, you know, whatever. Uh the train industry in the early 1900s was pretty wild, all things considered, and it had to grow really, really fast. That leads us to part two: the main line and dangers. So, by the time of today's dumpster fire of 1918, steam engines, trains, people, and goods were moving about the country at breakneck speeds. We're talking like 40 to 60 miles an hour, which granted, that's that's what I think most people do through a school zone these days in their cars. But back then, dude, moving 60 miles an hour that that was crazy fast. Uh, and oftentimes when you're trying to build all this infrastructure of transportation, safety, uh, well, let's just let's just say in 1800, safety third, uh maybe safety fifth instead of safety first, right? Uh, the demand to get these things built was paramount. Working around and with trains and their rails is an inherently stressful and dangerous job. It seems as though whenever humanity mixes large volumes of steel with huge pieces of machinery and when operated again by human beings, even the smallest of injuries could be catastrophic. Uh, because well, the 1800s of it all, like it seemed like you would just get an infection. But how is it that a dog can hurt himself pretty bad, get stitches, and be fine? Whereas a human can get a little cut, get some stitches, and then die like two months later from infection. It's like our immune systems really suck. Um, to list some of the common uh work-related injuries from the 1800s and going to the 1910s, and they get progressively worse and worse and worse here. So you had heat-related issues stemming from working outside during the summer, disease from working next to people from around the world. So a lot of uh uh Asians were brought over to work on the railroad system. And man, like look at the Spanish flu. Once you have a lot of people from all over the world meeting in one spot, whether it's a battlefield or a railroad, uh, people start catching diseases from all over the world, which can cause problems. Uh, you have broken and fractured bones, uh, you can get burn-related injuries, uh, back and neck-related strains from manipulating heavy volumes of cargo, as well as working on the steam engines themselves. Seems like nothing on these engines was light. I mean, these things are all made from iron and steel. Uh, I think the idea of titanium was a uh yeah, that wasn't even in the imagination. I think back then heavier was viewed stronger. Um, let us not forget about ligament and tendon injuries. And then, of course, you got straight up being crushed. There's a process when you're connecting two cars where the dude has to stand in between the two cars and one of them's moving, the other one is stationary. And uh, these two cars would have like these bumpers on them that would have springs inside that kind of absorb the shock when the two uh connectors met, like a glad hand type of thing. So, like if you're the poor sap that had to connect cars, you had to stand in between two cars moving towards each other, albeit slow, but these things are weighing, you know, hundreds of tons each, and then they would connect, and then you had to like put like a uh um like a key rod in between the connection points to keep it from coming apart. Yeah, that that just doesn't sound right to me. That seems like a disaster waiting to happen. And it did. A lot of people did get crushed in in all that. God help you if you fell underneath the the train, uh you're just gonna get mangled to death on that. Uh head injuries resulting from uh from falls and objects hitting you. Not uncommon for uh large bolts and you know rods and pipes and whatnot falling on you. Because if you ever take apart one of the steam engines, you know how they have that large beak on them. And like if you were to cut it in half and you look inside, it would just be like just dozens and dozens and dozens of tubes that the water would be fed through that would be heated up and then turned into steam. And uh yeah, those things weren't light. Oh, and then of course, you can't forget about the loss of limbs. It was a very, very common thing. If you saw somebody walking around, uh missing an arm or a leg, it was probably one of two reasons. Uh, one, proximity to a war, okay, that that wars typically cost arms and legs and lives, and then the other would be working in the train industry. Uh, working on trains became so dangerous in the 1800s going into the 1900s, and injuries were so prevalent that doctors would remain on site, uh, shot uh at train stations, shops, and even on the trains themselves. So it was not uncommon to see a doctor wherever you went in in this industry, they were everywhere, and and you would have doctors that would be employed by train companies to be like, Hey, I know you just do like basic family care, like I we know you're a general practitioner, but can you go take some courses on you know how to handle training-related injuries? And you could actually take courses on this stuff. So the same doctor that you would go to to treat like an allergy would also be the same doctor that would amputate a leg and arm or whatever that got severely damaged from the industry. Uh, it was just common practice. It seemed like everybody knew somebody in the 1800s who lost an arm and a leg working on the trains. All the more reason for me to not work on a train. Although I don't think that's very common today. And I think a lot of that's because of the uh what happened after today's incident. However, as the demand called for more and more railways, uh, an equal demand for more trains followed suit. The plethora of railways offered options for passengers to get to anywhere in the country, and the options made it possible for passengers to select a route that would best suit their needs. Okay, so let's take a look at this. Let's say, let's say you have a 12-hour ride ahead of you. Um, and you would normally have one option hop on a train, sit in a coach, like maybe a tiny, tiny little cab with like four or five other people, or you're just sitting on a seat and you're going from point A to point B 12 hours on a train, and that that was it. Yes, that would get you where you need to go quicker than what any horse and buggy or even car could do. But who wants to sit in a seat for 12 hours like that? I mean, anybody who's taking an international flight would probably recognize that, man, being in first class would be nice right now. And it's an option. Financially, it may not be an option, but it's an option because we have so much variety now. The same thing applies to trains. So, like, let's say you had the money uh and you had a 12-hour train right ahead of you. You could, again, if you had the money, you could rent out a cabin that would have a bed in it. It may have like a little wash basin in there, uh, it would have like a sitting area. You know, it it's like a like a tiny little bedroom, and that would make a 12-hour ride way more bearable. And that was kind of the cool thing that came about uh this mass transit system involving trains, is that you have multiple different options to get from point A to point B, even if it would take the same amount of time, you still had options. I don't know if you've ever seen those videos on YouTube where the dude, like, you know, he's flying from here to you know Abidabi, and uh he somehow gets into one of those uh like platinum seats where it's like yeah, it's a super long flight, but it has its own bedroom and bathroom and has Wi-Fi, has a TV in it and all that kind of stuff. And yeah, it it's like thousands and thousands of dollars to get one of those flights. But I don't know. That would be pretty cool. If I had the money, I would definitely go that route. Which, listeners, if you wanted to make that experience happen for me in Kara or our families, uh yeah, feel free to send us a donation. We will not complain. Um, especially if it's for research purposes and you need us to fly to Europe or whatever to research something firsthand, and you want us to take that first class platinum type seat, uh, we will not we will not stop you. I promise you we will come back with some really, really good research for you. You may even get a special episode out of us. So the other side of the coin is that as the railways increased, so did the number of trains that were hauling goods in people all over the place. For us road dwellers, i.e., us that drive to work every day, seeing an abundance of cars on a road each year increase doesn't really come as a surprise. As a species, we keep adding more and more lanes to the freeways to handle the traffic. Not uncommon. Now it looks like it from a different perspective. Imagine all those cars going down a single road. Okay, and this single lane road also needs to account for head-on traffic. So you now have one lane going to and from point A to point B, and that one lane now has to account for traffic coming in and traffic coming out. Uh, I don't see that working very well. I see that in any large volume turning into an absolute flaming disaster. The only thing you could do is start off, pull off to the side of the road, wait for a height-on car to pass, and then you get back on the road, keep going, and hope to God that you have cars that pull off the side of the road for you to pass, right? It's uh yeah, it's a very, very uh delicate balancing act of getting from one place to the next and not killing each other on the way. So, in the case of today's Semsifire, the number of train engines on a single-lane railway imposes a lot of complexity and subsequent danger to a day-to-day operation. And it was becoming more and more common, right? The war required more of everything, and that included the number of engines on a single track. In the 1800s, the number of train-related collisions skyrocketed each year. Uh, whenever you have more than one operating train on a single track, a great deal of work and planning and timing needs to go into effect to make things work. One of the worst train accidents of the 1800s took place in 1891 when a fast-moving uh mail train collided with a slower moving Toledo Express, killing over 50 people. I think it was Kitpen, Illinois, uh, which is just west of Cleveland, or not Kit, Illinois, uh Kitpen, Ohio, uh, just west of Cleveland, Ohio. Uh, the collision, the cause of the collision is not what you'd think. It was the result of a four-minute discrepancy between the mail line and the Toledo Express. Web C. Ball, who saw this accident, and when he kind of pinpointed, like, huh, what in the world caused this? And he discovered that it was just the clock in one station was off by four minutes, then the clock on the other station. And all it took is for a conductor to have a clock not be accurate. And now, you know, if you got something that's moving 40, 50, 60 miles an hour, a lot can happen in four minutes. So WebC Ball was so inspired by the incident that he started the famous ball watch company, which made real world watches with a very high degree of accuracy that eventually became the standard for the Swiss and Japanese watchmakers of today. So these watches had to be with using gears and springs and what they had to be accurate to you know, like a minute per day. Like they had to back then be within seconds each day. So that's a pretty impressive when you think about how much work that goes into making one of those things. Since the 1890s, going to the 1970s, American-made watches were some of the most accurate out there. And then quartz watches came about, and that ruined an entire industry. Uh, different episode for a different time. The rise and potential devastation of these train crashes in the 1800s led to the increased government involvement as people wanted to use trains but not get killed in the process. Uh, in response to growing concerns over issues around uh stopping their trains, George Westinghouse modified his passenger trains with air brakes before uh trains could only be stopped by a dude in each car or assigned to each car that would have to pull a lever, so they would actually have to go outside the car where the two like each car connects, they have to go out there, pull a lever, uh a lever with all their might to engage the braking system. And every car had its own independent braking system, and uh you would have a dude in each one that would all have to pull the lever at the same time. That's assuming that you could find a dude dumb enough and crazy enough to go out there and pull that lever while the train is moving at speed. So you could have 15-20 cars, and before you need 15-20 dudes out there pulling that lever at the same time, and then you had to get them all like you had to notify them all at once. It yeah, it was just super inefficient and uh very impractical, and it didn't really work. Uh, Westinghouse put um like pneumatic or air-powered brakes in his commuter train. So basically, at the push of a button, all the brakes engage at once. The government kind of got involved and said that hey, we need to start putting more safety measures in here. And they this pneumatic uh braking system was one such thing that Westinghouse put in place. It didn't reduce the amount of train crashes, but it really did reduce the amount of people getting injured from these crashes because hey, at least the trains were slowing down before they're they crashed into each other versus like speeding up. Uh the next change took place in between 1888 and 1890 when Eli uh developed the automatic car coupler. The need for people to stand in between two moving uh train cars and ensure they connected properly was gone. So that that suicide mission wasn't a thing anymore. So we saw the reduced amount of people getting crushed every year andor losing limbs. In the 1890s, the Interstate Commerce Commission or the ICC, and we will definitely hear them more and more, was assembled to research train-related accidents and publish their findings. Uh, their findings would make their way to the 1880 or 1893 Safety Appliance Act, which federally mandated safety equipment in all trains. So cool, it only took what 60 some odd years, but eventually laws are passed that made uh safety equipment kind of like mandatory on all trains. Uh the train manufacturers and the train rural companies didn't like it because now they had to spend more money on this stuff. But the people liked it and the workers liked it because uh yeah, um, you just want to be able to go to work and not die in the process. That's I think that's a small thing to ask any employer. In 1900, 1918, um, America was seeing uh increase uh an increased interest in worker safety ventures, and trains were certainly on the list. So 1900, 1918, people were like looking at all industries and like, hey, how can we make this safer? How can we make this more livable? And trains were like high up on the list. What came of this? Mandatory inspections, mandatory safety equipment on all engines and cars, uh, mandatory standard operating procedures. In other words, each manufacturer company had to have a cohesive, uh, comprehensive uh set of procedures that everybody had to follow to make sure that nobody's making the wrong assumption. As you'll see, assumptions get people into a lot of trouble in this episode. Mandatory communication and timing protocols, uh, mandatory track inspections, block tracking, which divided the track into a series of little sections called well, blocks, and would have indicator lights on them that would automatically trip when a train passed, uh, which should give notice to head-on trains if a train coming at them had passed or not, right? So a train approaching one of these block lights could see, oh, it's green. All right, cool, it's good to go, or it would be red, and uh that would be your cue to kind of use like a double track or to like get off the track, let that one pass, and then you get back on. There was also the implementation of turntables and side tracks where a train could park off the main track to wait for a head-on train to pass, as I just mentioned, all assuming that everything was running on time. A conductor would be given a timetable of what the trains were doing for that day. So, you know, hey, you're you're operating on these tracks, uh, what is scheduled to be heading out towards you, what is scheduled to be heading out after you, and what times are departing and arriving. They would be given a massive amount of information that they would have to look at every day, you know, and uh and hope that everybody else got the same thing, and everybody else is uh following the same procedures. So it it was literally like that math problem that I started the episode off with. Imagine that, but multiplied to like 10, 15, 30 other trains all operating on on a rail system, and uh suddenly that math problem, like I would love to take one of these math problems, go back to like 1900, present it to some of these engineers and conductors. I bet you anything they could just look at it and just spit out an answer within seconds. Like they would probably know what the answer is, as opposed today, where like if you present a math problem like this to any adult, they're just gonna shake their head and say the world will never know, which is honestly what I would probably do if I saw a math problem like that. By 1910, America began seeing a shark decline in training related injuries, collisions, and injuries as a result of these inventions and practices. America was humming along with a vast railray system and it Booming economy where one fed the other exponentially. Uh, as mentioned earlier, World War I was going to change all of that. Uh, World War I in many ways was going to change the nation, and uh how the trains were used was going to be no different. So that leads us into part four, the turntable without a view. Now that we looked at some of the issues surrounding the railroad industry and what was done to kind of make it safer, uh again, you'll notice that there wasn't so much stuff involved on how to make the trains not collide. But in general, though, how to like what else can we do? Like making the trains not collide ever was such a monumental task that they kind of came with some stuff for, but then the rest of it was all like, okay, we can't guarantee no collisions, but hey, we can try to make sure that people aren't getting arms and legs cut off or crushed or or whatever. So let's take a look at what happened in 1918 that made this train collision so quote unquote great, and the worst collision in US history. And I've noticed that the more I study dumpster fires, the more I start seeing, you know, the biggest battle or the worst of this in history, or the greatest of this in history, the most expensive. It's almost like we are trying to find we're we're always trying to up our disaster game. Like humans take pride in like, cool, this was the worst hurricane ever in human history. Woo-hoo, look at us. Sucks that my house is gone, but hey man, I was a part of that kind of a mentality. Before we proceed without a map, uh, because this isn't really a visual podcast. Let's kind of break things down a little bit in terms of like geography, the trains involved, and and all that kind of stuff. Um, so let's take a look at the geography. And we're looking at a I think it's only a 10 to 20 mile long piece of track just outside downtown Nashville, Tennessee, where everything took place. This track would eventually connect up to a track that would span between Memphis and Nashville. And the this little track that we're talking about here, like this 10 to 20 mile long section, is called the Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis Railway. And I love how, like, whenever uh train companies buy out other sections of track, they just add the name of that onto the original one. So you get like these long, long names of cities and states and locations, and then at the end of it, it's just railway. It's kind of it's kind of funny. So if you look at a map of tracks in Tennessee at that time, uh in 1918, it would be super confusing. There was just so much railway going on that I I'm not even able to figure it out. So we're just gonna really zoom in on this uh this 10-mile-long section of of track. And just west of downtown Nashville, about eight miles from track, is kind of a a sketchy blind turn. Remember, like when you're running a train, uh you can't stop very easily. So when you're approaching a turn where all you can see is like two, three hundred feet down the track before it kind of goes around a hill, you have no idea what's around that turn. You have no idea what's coming at you, and uh, you're just hoping to God that everybody is running on time and that your assumptions are good. Because if you as soon as you see that that light heading towards you, it's over. There's nothing, there's nothing you could do. And so there was that that blind turn, and it uh so happened that it was so affectionately called uh Dutchman's curve. So for us driving in a car, not that big of a deal. If you were in a train, Dutchman's curve might as well been like a U-turn. Uh it it hugged the side of this tall hill, and it was impossible to see anything that was coming at you except for a couple hundred feet out. Uh, anyone who worked on a train at this time was familiar with this turn, this uh Dutchman's curve. Anyone who traveled this curve would have markedly higher blood pressure uh until they cleared it. It was just the you know nature of the situation. There were two trains that traveled between Nashville and Memphis, again, on the same track. So, unless certain precautions were put in place, a collision was going to be inevitable. One such precaution was a cutout of track in between Dutchman's curve and the main station in Nashville. This was called the shops because it had what is known as a turntable. Turntables are really, really cool. And you and I think if you ever watched, like, was it Thomas? Oh, yeah, okay. Thomas. So if you've ever seen Thomas the tank engine, I think they actually have uh a thing on there called a uh turntable, and all it is is just a short piece of track that you can park your train engine on or cars or whatever, and it can turn 360 degrees. And a lot of times, and I'll we'll we'll have pictures on our website, the daystemsterfire.com, of what the shops would look like, but you could have a train pull up, park on one of these turntables. The turntables can then pivot uh to like any open bay, and then you would run that car into that bay or that engine into that bay so it can get worked on. And so, like it was a crescent-shaped building that had all sorts of different bays in there, and they could do um any number of things to these trains, everything from maintenance to repairs and everything. And that's why this section right before, so heading from Nashville to Memphis, that eight miles out part, uh, the shops, as they were called, where that turntable was, was was purposely put there because hey, you might as well, as you're leaving Nashville, stop off at the shops there, wait for an oncoming train to pass, and then you know you're clear to go afterwards. So, yeah, pretty cool thing. I'll I'll have pictures of it on on on the website, uh Dave Sunsterfire.com, so you can see what I'm talking about. Um, so one thing to keep in mind was that there was a procedure where inbound trains, so like anything coming into Nashville would have priority. Meaning if you were leaving Nashville on a train, you would it would be a standard procedure that you would be you would leave Nashville, you would see the cutoffer uh shops, and you would just park there, usually for like 10 minutes or so, and you just waited for the oncoming train to go by, and then you knew at that point that the track was clear, hop back on, and uh yeah, you're good to go. Again, this is all assuming that everything is running on time, or give or take a reasonable amount of time. Uh, yes, the conductor had a timetable of the day schedule of when the trains were supposed to be departing and arriving, uh, when and where, and yes, the watch industry had produced some pretty accurate clocks and watches to make sure everything was running on time. The standard procedure was to make sure that the outbound train hanging out at the shops got a visual confirmation of the inbound train to make sure the track was clear. So there was a lot of backup, a lot of uh redundancy and stuff like that really tried its best to make sure. So an oncoming train would be spotted. And assuming that you had a clear line of sight, which when you're at the shops, it wasn't that easy because you had to look through like a bunch of trees and whatever to see a train go by. Yeah, you like and you had all this technology that's awesome, and you had all this this stuff, but it was still kind of difficult. And uh the shops even had a tower that could overlook a huge portion of Dutchman's curve, and it too would have a visual confirmation of a train coming by, and the dispatcher, uh down in the shops, like at ground level, would have like a uh telegraph that would communicate to Nashville or whatever, so that they could communicate with each other and really, really make sure. I want when I was looking or researching this, a lot of people put a lot of blame on like the lackadaisical safety protocols here, but I don't know. I I feel like this is pretty well thought out. And too, it's not like the crews on these two trains in in this incident were inexperienced, they have years of experience and uh they they knew what they were doing. So the key was that visual confirmation. Once you saw this train go by, you're good to go. And you knew that because there was only one other train on the track. I can only imagine what it must have been like if there was like four or five other trains on the track. That I don't know, I feel like that's just a disaster that's going to happen. So it is this shops to Dutchman's curve place where everything took place on July 9th, 1918, at 7 to 720 in the morning. All right, now let's take a look at our trains that are involved, and I'm just gonna refer to them as they were actually called train number four and train number one, and then each one had an engine designation and all that stuff, but I'm just gonna call it train one, train four. Uh, departing from Nashville was train number four, and it was pulled by engine two eighty-two, okay. Behind engine two eighty-two, and there's all sorts of schematics about the engine, you know, like the the wheel configuration, drivetrain, and all that. As cool as that is, again, Kara's not here to be bored to death from it. So I'm I I'm not really gonna cover it, but look it up if you're interested in that sort of thing. It's it's pretty cool. I thought a steam engine was a steam engine. Oh no, no, no, no. They they made all sorts of different kinds. It's uh it's it's pretty intense how how far it went. And now behind Engine 282 was a car used for baggage and mail. That's right. Mail was once the Pony Express kind of literally died out, trains did a lot of the mail hauling back then. So you would have a car behind the train or the engine that would have like passenger luggage and mail, and this train they had another baggage car, so they it was just a car dedicated to baggage, and then after that were six passenger cars or coaches. All six of these cars being pulled by engine 282 were wooden, so steel was still on its rise. A lot of a lot of companies were still using wooden cars, and I could see that too. Like, I think a wooden car would absorb vibrations a little better. Let's face it, steel was probably a uh a better option if available. So that was coming out of Nashville, heading towards Memphis, was train number four. Coming out of Memphis, Tennessee was train number one, which was pulled by engine 281. Uh, 281 and 282 were actually sister uh engines. They were built in the same factory in at the same time in like 1905. So yeah, these two engines had been around for a hot minute. Um, behind engine 281 was a baggage car, cool, followed by wooden passenger cars or coaches, and then following that were uh two Pullman sleeper cars. A uh sleeper car is kind of what I mentioned before, where they actually had like little bedrooms that you could hang out on and and you know stay in for days at a time. Uh, I think it was a seven or eight hour ride from Memphis to Nashville. So some people may want one of those uh sleeper cars to take like a nap in while they were traveling for seven to eight hours. One of those Pullmans were like solid steel, the whole thing was steel. The other one had like a steel like undercarriage and end caps, but everything else in the middle of it was made of wood. Since this is still the height of the Jim Crow era, uh yeah, we cannot escape the uh the the racistness of the time period. Uh the front passenger cars on both trains were designated for blacks only. It was viewed that the lead cars were the worst places to be because of the proximity of the engine noise, soot from the smokestacks, as well as smoke and steam and and all that. Like they were basically closest to the engine. And uh, you know that Jim Crow said that, you know, separate but equal, that's stupid crap. So, like, basically, regardless of how much money uh the black person paid at that time, they had to sit in the front where it was the most miserable. Also, it was generally understood that if a train did collide with another one, the people in those front cars were most likely to get killed. So, like, as opposed to like uh other parts where like black people had to sit in the back, the white trailway system at this time is like, oh no, no, no, blacks, you can sit up front, you can be up there this time, knowing that if something bad were to happen, they were the ones that were going to absorb the most amount of energy. So, again, still cannot escape that racism, and yet people still say there was no racism. I don't quite understand how that works. Anyways, I'll let you run with that as you will. Now, a lot of these black folks that were on these trains um were heading to or from a munitions facility in Old Hickory, which is like on the opposite side of Nashville. Uh, they offered a ton of jobs, the pay for black workers was really, really good, and the demand was high because, well, they needed people to make bullets for the war effort. If you are a black man in the south trying to find work, this was a solid opportunity, and a lot of people uh took this. The trains were also transporting some soldiers. Now, I I read some sources like the oh, yeah, there was other than black folks, there was like a bunch of other soldiers in. I don't know. I I read some reports that like the trains were filled with the soldiers. Uh, I read some reports where there aren't any on there. I'm not sure. I'm just assuming that there would have been some soldiers on there that were getting ready to head out for the war. I just can't confirm how many. So, from here, the episode is gonna behave more like a math problem than a narrative. So I'm gonna try to keep the chain of events as concise as possible. Uh, just like the Titanic, we know it's gonna happen, right? We we know the ship is gonna sink. We know that these trains are going to crash, unfortunately. It would be a really weird episode if uh it would be a really weird episode if we had a show where two trains just passed each other and nothing happened, and then just roll the credits like cool. So I think if if you are listening to this uh and you're you're seeing the title of the great train wreck of 1918, uh you you know what's gonna happen here. Train number one left Memphis at around midnight on July 9th for Nashville and was scheduled to arrive in Nashville at around 710 in the morning. So yeah, it's about a seven seven-hour ride. However, due to complications and just things happening, train number one was running about 30 minutes late. So for whatever reason, it it just took extra time to get it reloaded and and and all that kind of stuff. It was 30 minutes late. It was 30 minutes behind. The trains didn't have very good communication uh at the time. It's not like wireless communication was very effective. Uh, yes, I think they had like a wireless uh telegraph system, but trying to try to get a message out to a train while I was in moving around a mountain or a hill or whatever, it yeah, it was really, really tough. Both trains, stations, and train number four did not know specifically what was going on with train number one. So, yeah, train number four was the one leaving Nashville, and I'll I'll cover that here in a little bit. But both trains really didn't have any idea of what the other train was doing, and train number one uh was running about seven minutes behind. So uh when we look at this, we have a total of 37 minutes of what I call temporal noise, meaning you have minutes that we just don't know what happens. But since both trains were moving, we know something was happening, we just don't know what. Uh, assuming that the trains were moving around 50 miles an hour, there could be 25 to 30 miles discrepancy between the two trains and or the conductors and engineers thought that they should be at, right? So, like if you're the conductor of train number four, you would be like, Okay, well, I know train number one is on this, and looking at my little chart here, I know it's heading my direction, and I know it's supposed to arrive here at my station by 710. And I'm supposed to leave this station at around seven, and uh that means 10 minutes out, we're gonna cross paths. So we've got to go somewhere to hang out and just wait for that other train to go by. That was the basic idea of it. It is also important to note that both train conductors and engineers were given very, very clear descriptions of what each other's setups would look like. What kind of engines, what kind of cars, configuration of the cars, um, you know, the make and models, like but everybody that worked on that track would know what the trains would look like. Uh, this was really, really important because this way, if you see a if you if you're pulled over in the shops waiting for somebody to come in from Memphis and you see something that doesn't look right come by, then you'll be like, hmm, that's not my train. Uh that this track is probably not clear. Or if you do see this train go by and you're like, okay, I know for a fact that this thing has got like six or eight cars, I know the engine, I know everything about this, including the time. And then you see it go by, you're like, okay, I'm 100% confident this track is now clear. So everybody was given a very good description of what other trains were to were to look like. And and it and it could also be said for uh train number one coming by when they go by the shops and then they see the train number one and how many cars it's pulling, and it matches the description that it has, then it's pretty confident now that there's not going to be another train coming at them for that remaining eight miles before they get to Nashville, right? You know, it's like it's it's like a win-win. So again, another safety precaution put in place here. It's kind of impressive. Um, soon as train number one was supposed to be at Nashville station at 710, the conductor and engineer on train four surmised accurately that train one was running behind, and they had no idea for how long. So at this point, like they're heading towards shops, anyways, and they were just gonna hang out there. Both trains knew that train four was scheduled to stop at the shops and wait for train one to pass. Uh, this was the fix for whenever you whenever a train was running late on a single track, pulling off at a specific point and waiting for the other train to go by makes it so that there is no way there could be a collision. This is further fortified by the procedure of giving the right of way to the inbound train. Even if both trains were running behind, a safety protocol factored in, factor in a near-foolproof mechanism to ensure two trains don't meet up on a single track at the same time. You kinda yeah, you kinda have to uh make assumptions here, right? Uh you have to assume that the both trains are one on time. If not, what do you do when they're not on time? Uh, what are you looking for? When do you pull over? And man, how many, how many times have we seen this where humanity tries to think of a plan so well thought out that nothing could go wrong? And it seems like that's happened here, right? There was a lot of stuff that went into place here to make sure that there would be no collision, and yet there was. So that's the reason why this is uh this uh this episode came to be is it's like man, everybody tried to work it out from the 1800s up to 1918 how to prevent these types of collisions, and they put a lot of things in place, and yet here we are making its way onto this show for all the wrong reasons. As predicted, train four got to the shops and essentially parked off the main track to wait for train one to pass. Uh, the dispatcher in the shop station reported that he had not seen train one go by, so that's a dude on the ground in the shops. Um, JS Johnson was positioned in the observation tower at shops and was kind of keeping an eye on Dutchman's curve to wait for Twain Twain Train One to go by. So we have redundancy here. You got the guy waiting on the ground, didn't see it go by. You got the guy in the freaking tower that can see down Dutchman's curve. He hasn't seen anything. So everybody's like, okay, yep, train train one is still out there, and it hasn't gotten here yet. So train one, don't go out there. Just chill. The conductor in train one uses downtime to check tickets and make sure all the passengers on the train were supposed to be there. I can't confirm the source, but I read somewhere that the conductor on train four had recently been reprimanded for taking too long to check in tickets. Uh since the War broke up, the demand on passenger trains grew significantly and put more stress on conductors to process more and more passengers. So, yeah, he kind of got busted a little bit for taking too long to verify everybody's tickets. So this guy is like, all right, cool. While we are parked here, uh, I'm just gonna run through all the cars and make sure everybody has valid tickets. I'm not sure what they did if they didn't have tickets, maybe throw them off the train. I have no idea. Seeing this stop at shops is a good way to get caught up. He delegated the responsibilities of spotting train number four. Um, I'm sorry, spotting train number one when it went by, and then tell the engineer up front that all is clear. Conductor checking in tickets, he tells his right-hand man, like, hey, bro, do me a favor, keep an eye on the track. It's I know it's through the forest. You know, can't see the forest through the trees, but you should be able to see a train go by. And uh, you know, let me know and they'll let the engineer know once you see it go by. I mean, fair enough, it's a pretty hard thing to miss. At around 710-ish, the crewman on train four spotted through the trees what appeared to be train one's engine passing by, thus clearing the curve, and to have train four proceed. Since train four was seven minutes behind the schedule, the engineer by the name of David Kennedy and this guy, man, he was by the book. Everything was by the book, he did not mess around. And uh he really, really, really made sure that the coast was clear and all that other fun stuff. So he kept the engine running, he kept the engine running hot. And the idea was that you know he could get going faster to try to make up some time. That's not outside the procedures. So the engineer, David Kennedy, Mr. by the book, decided to keep the train running. And once he got word that train one had passed by, he's like, All right, let's get going, let's make up for a lost time. However, the crewman did not spot train number one passing by. Instead, he saw what is known as a switch engine, or better yet, they're like a they're like a single engine, smaller uh train that would move like empty cars back and forth. So that way, if one, like say Nashville, had a higher demand and needed more cars, a switch engine would bring them from Memphis and vice versa. So that's all it was. It was just a little train that would move empty cars around to meet needs. Kind of kind of a handy thing, but it can also be a little uh confusing. The conductor, while he was checking tickets, heard the engine go by and he just assumed that it was train one. Remember, you were trying to look, they're at this turntable and they're trying to look through trees and everything to confirm. It wasn't really easy to tell at first, so they just assumed, well, I heard it go by. That's got to be train one, we're good to go. And then he gave the go-ahead for Mr. Kennedy up front to move on. So it was kind of the same situation in the shops dispatching side of things. They heard a train go by, told Johnson in the tower to turn on the all clear light for a train for to proceed. A lot of people thought the same thing and drew the same conclusions because, after all, how is it possible for so many people to be wrong about the same thing all at once? As Johnson flipped the all-clear light on, he looked down at his logs because he had to make note of it, and he made a gut-wrenching discovery. There was no record of train one going by. So, like, he gave the go-ahead, but he noticed that wait a second, train one still had not passed. So, what passed, right? And that's where he's like, Okay, crap, we gotta stop this train for before it's too late. So, acting quickly, uh, Johnson reached out to the dispatcher, tried to get a hold of the conductor or engineer on train four to stop, try, you know, just stop moving at least, or try backing up or whatever. Johnson sounded the emergency whistle from the tower, hoping that someone in train four would hear it and get the idea to at least have stopped the train from getting back on the main track. Now, these things are loud. Like if you are standing next to them when they go off, it will cause permanent hearing damage. Ironically, they're also powered by steam. So, yeah, these things are definitely loud. However, for some odd reason, it was too late. Kennedy and train four had basically hit the gas, air quotes here, hit the gas hard, and the train was fast accelerating towards Dutchman's curve. It is estimated that the train was only a few hundred yards away from the shops when Johnson made that discovery that train one had not really gone by and sounded the emergency whistle. As a result, we're not too sure what was happening in train four that prevented them from hearing or heeding the whistle. I have three theories behind this uh as to what may have happened. Uh, the first one is that train one was trying to make up lost time and therefore kept the engine running hot and loud so that it could accelerate faster, thus muffling the emergency whistle. The whistle on the observation tower and the one on the train could have been made identically, and therefore the people on the train were not in a position to hear the warning any differently. It would just sound like a normal train whistle going off. And then the third one is the train would have left the station tooting its own horn to notify people to get off the track down the road. So the emergency whistle could have been drowned out as well. So I don't know exactly what happened there. Uh it was pending investigation, and I think the jury's still out on why train number four didn't hear or heed any of the warnings. Regardless of all the warnings and desperate attempts to get train four to stop, the train proceeded and even accelerated towards Dutchman's curve. Train one was doing the same thing but heading towards train number four. When the two trains met, they were moving at 50 to 60 miles an hour each, thus behaving as though one train is hitting a massive wall at 100 to 120 miles an hour. So that takes us to part four, a cornfield meeting. And uh cornfield meeting is literally the term the railroad industry puts in for two trains that collide. So I thought that was kind of interesting, and it actually did take place in a cornfield. So trains one and four met on the blind turn Dutchman's curve at 720 in the morning. Um, there weren't many eyewitnesses of the event, but given the collision took place in a suburban like-ish location with neighborhoods and and whatnot, a lot of people didn't see what happened, but they certainly heard it. Shockingly, the conductors of both trains survived the incident, but the engineers and fire stokers were pretty much erased off the face of the planet when the collision happened. Uh, there must have been some visual contact between the two trains and the curve because the conductor on number four said that he felt the airbags go into effect almost instantly, but the conductor and number one didn't feel a thing. So four was like, oh my god, head on train and tried stopping. Whereas number one didn't even they they couldn't respond quick enough. The two engines collided and propelled themselves upward like an upside-down V. A moment later, the two engines tipped over onto a cornfield, which gave the term for the two trains crashing head on as a cornfield meeting. It's interesting to note that even though both engines were severely damaged, they were actually repaired. And we're gonna go into like what kind of damage they sustained. But yeah, we're gonna we're gonna see like, yeah, these things were annihilated, but they actually were rebuilt and they ran until like 1947, 1948, where they were then sold and turned into scrap. Um, however, damage to the mail baggage cars as well as the passenger cars fared a much different fate. The dichotomy of the steel cars versus the wooden ones were stark. The same could be said about who lived and who died. So let's go over the train cars first. And what I'm gonna read here is the description from the Interstate Commerce Commission of the ICC, and I'm just gonna read it because I think it does a really, really good job explaining what things look like. So Locomotive 281, or train number one, was derailed on the west side of the track, the boiler being stripped of cab machinery and aperturances, yeah, uh appeturnances, and came to rest in an upright position at an angle of about 45 degrees with the track. Its frame and all machinery were practically demolished. The baggage car was completely demolished. The first coach lay crosswise on the track, the combination of train number four being driven into its side near the center of its rear and torn completely into a uh depth of 12 to 15 feet. Second coach was derailed and it its forward went in, uh yet went down the bank and rested on the front end of the boiler of Locomotive 281 and its rear and rested on the road bed on top of the frame jammed against the rear of the second coach. The rear trucks of his car and the four following cars were not derailed. Locomotive 282 or train number four was derailed to the east side of the track and the boiler thrown from the main uh from the frame and entirely stripped of all machinery and the appurtenances and stopped about parallel with the track, the entire locomotive except the boiler being demolished. The forward half of the combination car was demolished by coming in contact with the first coach of train number one. The baggage car was completely telescoped with the first coach to its rear. Both cars remained upright but were practically destroyed. The end of the second coach was demolished for a distance of six to eight feet and partially telescoped with the uh rear end of the coach ahead of it. The three uh rear cars of the train number four were not derailed and only slightly damaged. So I think the ICC did a pretty good job describing the aftermath of the incident and show the uh differences between how a steel car versus a wooden car held up to such a violent crash. And I'll have pictures on on the website, uh the daysumpsterfire.com. So be sure to go check those out. So again, the ICC wrote that it is to be noted that all the cars of both trains, except the two sleeping cars and train number one, were of wooden construction, and six of these wooden cars were entirely destroyed. The general consensus is that if all the cars were made of steel, then the number of casualties would have been significantly less. So, yep, be sure to check out the website for more details on that. Uh, quick heads up the following parts uh will be of a graphic nature and may not be suitable for uh younger or sensitive listeners, because we're gonna kind of get into the uh uh what happened to the bodies here. Much like the wooden train cars, the bodies and passengers shared a similar fate. Most of the 101 or the most of the 101 dead uh were those of black men who were headed to the DuPont munitions plant just outside Nashville. This was due to the fact that the good old-fashioned Jim Crow laws forced blacks into the front passenger cars that were made of wood. As the energy passed one car to the next, the effects of the impact diminished greatly, which means at the means at the uh the back cars sustained, yeah, I'm sorry, impact diminished greatly, which means that the black quote unquote cars sustained the brunt of the impacts, and the whites in the back were for the most part okay. The initial crash was heard all the way in downtown Nashville and felt by those who were in the vicinity of Dutchman's curve. Therefore, it didn't take long for tens of thousands of Nashvilleans to port over to the crash site. There were the usual gawkers and souvenir collectors and this the pure trash of people who tried to rob the bodies of their valuables before anybody else could get a hold of them. I I don't get it. Like, person's dead, man. Why do you have to like take all the stuff on top of it? There were some of that, but I like to think that a majority of the people who showed up were there to help find survivors and try to get things cleaned up and whatnot. One of the issues surrounding the crash that complicated things tremendously was the matter of trying to identify what body parts belong to who. Thousands of doctors and nurses came to Dutchman's curve to essentially piece together body parts to figure out the total body count. The black men and women who bought tickets didn't have their identities listed on the tickets opposed to the white passengers. So the only thing the medical uh personnel could do was find a torso, a head, two legs, and two arms to make a whole person. So they literally had like piles of arms, legs, torsos, whatever. And then they would kind of like, well, we we are assuming that a normal human being would have a head, a torso, two arms and two legs. So go take two arms and two legs from the pile, add it to this torso with a head. Cool, we know that's one person. That was the only way they could figure out how many people died in in this initial crash. That to me is one of the most sickening parts of all this. Like the way that you have to like shed humanity to figure out what's left of humanity is is wild to me. So the devastation of the body stemmed from the wooden cars that telescope, crushing or straight up obliterating by impact. The wood itself wasn't enough to absorb that much energy. Wood also likes to shatter into splinters uh when hit hard enough, thus sending wood fragments like bullets through anyone in the way. Since the human body is comprised of 7% water, uh, the body itself does a poor job insulating from extreme impacts, which results in the bodies being fragmented and scattered all over the place. So, yeah, if you ever jump out of an aeroplane at 30,000 feet and you land in the ocean, you will literally explode before you sink into the water, which is a grisly thing to think about. But yes, water does not compress. So it's the reason why they don't use water and hydraulic fluid. The train crash also exemplified the Jim Crow laws. To this day, not all the bodies have been 100% identified, uh, due to the horrific nature of the crash and the lack of documentation involving black folks. Uh, what's crazy is that the crash took place at 7.20 in the morning. However, by the end of the day, the wreck was cleaned up, all the cars were removed, engines taken out, and for the most part, the body parts were collected and, well, cataloged, I guess you could say. I feel like this would have been a massive undertaking, but at the time, the railrays were crucial and could not be shut down for too long, especially those that headed towards uh wartime industries. So America's priority was gotta support the war front. The train crash also exemplified the Jim Crow laws and their applications. While it didn't help with any sort of civil rights movement, it did put a spotlight on segregation a little bit in that you know, the idea of separate is not equal. I think most modern Americans at the time understood the Jim Crow laws were a crock of crap, but sometimes it needs a huge moment in history like this to really show its true colors. Oftentimes a tragedy of this shy, this size shows people, uh shows what people can be, you know, rescuers, helpers, donors, spiritual leaders, etc. But a tragedy can also show what people actually are at times, such as racists, segregationalists, narrow-minded, and downright awful. While studying this episode, it was interesting to see how a person's skin color goes right out the window when a tragedy happens. It's a shame that 80% of the folks who died in the crash were black, including some women and a baby. Uh, but it what it also gave a glimpse into a future where Americans help each other out of the sake of helping each other out. I saw this in 9-11. I remember when the the two towers collapsed, and there was a helicopter footage of like you see the wreckage over the two towers were, and there was like nothing, no movement on the streets. And then after about a minute or so, you saw like the entire city, like everybody just started rushing towards ground zero. And next thing you know, there was thousands of people that were you know rummaging through the concrete and rebar and destruction trying to find bodies of any sort, and uh yeah, skin color and all that went right out the window. And in fact, the one poetic thing about that whole event was that there was so much dust in the air that literally everybody was the same color, right? Everybody was that that like tan, orangish color from all the uh dust and everything. So, like, who cares uh what anybody's skin color was, everybody was technically the same color. And for like a brief moment in American history, there was no race issues, it it was like a unified thing. And so, like, if we were to take anything from this horrible incident, is that is that hey, you know, there are times when people of different colors can get along and work things out. It's fleeting, but someday we'll get there. Um, so part five historical tonnage. Shortly after the train crash was cleaned up, the ICC got to work investigating what had happened as to why this sort of accident took place. And again, the general consensus to the cause of the wreck are as follows. And it's it's kind of you probably picked up some of the flags or some of the identification along the way here. The conductor on train number four only heard train number one go by, or so he thought. He never confirmed with the shops, the dispatcher, or Mr. Johnson in the tower to corroborate if train one actually had gone by. He just heard the train go by. He's like, Yep, that's it. Same thing with the underling, the guy that was working for him. He he saw it go by, but he couldn't confirm it. But he just assumed that, oh yeah, that's gotta be it. So that turntable without a view uh did not help matters. Uh, we could also make the argument that the conductor delegated the responsibility of seeing train one go by when he should have been doing it himself. But again, the dude got busted for not doing his job fast enough. So I can't blame him for taking advantage of the situation to try to get things caught up or else he would lose his job, kind of a thing. Train number four never properly checked the train register at the shops to confirm if train one had passed. They just assumed that it hadn't. They just assume that it did go by when it when when it did, and you know, assumptions. The tower operator failed to check his logs in time to see the train one had not passed in time, but at the time he caught the error of the switch engine going by, it was too late for train one to hear the warning or anything else for that matter that could get a hold of the train. Uh, the engineer in train four, David Kennedy, failed to follow any protocols and proceeded recklessly, thus causing the crash. Um, the newspapers at the time were brutal to Kennedy. They smeared his reputation from one end to the other. And basically saying that he was reckless, didn't follow the rules, you know, haste makes waste, you know, all this stuff. Um, regardless of if this was actually Kennedy's fault or not. The issue was that anyone who knew Kennedy could testify that he was a meticulous man and followed every rule in the book to the letter. He was never impulsive, never made a half-baked decision. So the accusations that he flippantly caused the entire accident seemed really, really strange to me. But that's also what humans do. We see a huge thing go down like this. We as humans want to find any person and blame them. And since he died in the wreck, he couldn't defend himself. So, like him and his family and everything like were destroyed afterwards. It uh that that unto itself is like the really kind of tragic part of this dumpster fire on top of all the people, like the 101 people that died, with 80% of them being black. The same could be said for the entire crew in both trains. Uh, while yes, experience levels did vary from individual to individual. Overall, both crews were well seasoned and properly trained. Uh, they did really adhere to the uh standard operating procedure or the SOP. So to pin the whole matter of simply just being human error doesn't sit well with me. One aspect of the accident that does resonate with me is the use of outdated materials and block signals. So steel was becoming more and more common in 1918, and the fact that the Nashville Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway Company was still using wooden cars, uh, that felt a little irresponsible and resulted in the deaths of a lot of people. The ICC concluded that if the steel cars were in use, then the number of fatalities would have been greatly diminished. Furthermore, the NC and STL still wasn't employing automatic block signals. At the time, uh automated block signaling would have provided a red light or green light for train number four to stop, proceed, or stay stopped, or or whatever, right? The whole red light, green light thing. You know, once train pass once train one passed a certain point, then a light would kick on saying don't go. Train one's on the way, and the train would automatically trigger that sensor, uh, indicating that it's not safe to go. And then when it triggered the one that is where it is safe to go, like it would pass, then a green light would come on for train number four to be like, all right, cool, you're good, you're good to go. So, and the same thing would be said for train one going by. It would show that, hey, there's a green light on the other side of Dutchman's curve, which means our the coast is clear and train number four was off the rails. If they had used that, I think that would have fixed a lot of things. Uh, yes, mechanical things do fail. You're not solely reliant on a human being in a tower somewhere or some dude in an office on the ground floor. You're not reliant on a complicated system of communication that could easily break down or be misinterpreted. At least it would have the the application of these systems would have made it so that a um some degree of redundancy, both mechanical and automated and human, were in effect. So I think today that's like standard issue everywhere. However, this is all the general consensus. And I think there's a bit more to this dumpster fire than what meets the eye. When researching moments in history where everything goes wrong, I seem to come across a common statement. You know, the biggest in history, the worst case ever, or the most expensive in nation's history, or others like it. Like we love that most, that worst, the superlative statements. Whenever I see something like that, the first thing I do is look at what else is going on in the country at that time. Because if this is the worst case, then why didn't it happen at another time? So there has to be logically, there has to be something else going on. In this case, the event that was all over the newspaper was World War I and the demand for everything skyrocketed during this time. So the demand for supplies, munitions, soldiers, workers, even minorities uh who were able to travel. So, like these black folks that were going hundreds of miles away to work in a munitions factory. The explosion of demand from all aspects of the country is great news financially, but extremely difficult on the infrastructure. Cities became more congested, pedestrians were filling the streets trying to get to work, mass transit became paramount. Uh, the rail system uh was pushed to the max, hauling not only large volumes of materials, but large volumes of people at the same time. Uh, there was a time where all you would have is like a track that would just haul people, and then you would have another track where it would haul goods. But now a lot of these rails were having to do double duty. Whenever an infrastructure is pushed to the limits and beyond, we have to start prioritizing who gets what part of the infrastructure over the other. What doesn't get prioritized also sees to reduce supply of manpower, development, oversight, effective regulation, etc. And now we arrive at something we have all experienced today: people having to take on more responsibilities, more work, more hours with less pay, and job security. Uh, this is something that is often missed at the top because their way of life rarely is affected by these sorts of decisions. What does this also do with the train crash of 1918? Well, let's dig in here. World War I was the first war that needed America to truly mobilize, meaning every state was going to feel to some degree. Before it was only certain industries or specific states that would feel the conflict. And yes, Kara, I know you're listening out there, and I know you're gonna mention the civil war affected every state in the Union, and you're right, but I'm going to argue that that was a nation fighting itself. And so that is a completely different thing than fighting a foreign enemy. I'm just gonna stick with that because I know you're gonna bring that up. You're probably sitting in your car and vacation and yelling at me um at the stereo. But yeah, no, the civil war is a completely different thing. Yes, every state was affected, but it was one side trying to destroy the other rather than one whole nation trying to destroy a foreign enemy, and the infrastructure gets pushed to its limits as a result of that, rather than being destroyed or taken over. When World War II um with World War One's America's manufacturing capabilities had to grow overnight, which means it needs more people to make the growth happen. It also meant a huge expansion of the resources to make the final products for war. So, again, go check out episode 14, the Boston Molasses Flood. Who would have thought that a brown sticky goo uh would be such a critical part of the war effort? It's just it's this wild to think about. Especially when you're this close to prohibition and and all the other fun stuff. On top of all the manufacturing demands, there was the demand for men in their 20s and 30s to actually go fight the war. It turns out those are the men in the prime working age. So that's where you want your workers to be as well, is in the 20s and 30s, young, healthy, and strong, capable, all that. Uh shockingly, you don't get much productivity out of a 90-year-old man compared to like a 20-year-old man. So now you need more men to work at home more than ever. You also need the same men in the generation to go overseas and do soldiery things. So you're starting to see like the bread and butter of an economy get really, really, really pushed here, really stretched out. Get everything from manufacturing demands to infrastructure demands to uh to personnel demands. I it's just a lot for um a country that has never experienced anything like this before to this scale to try and deal with. And as a result, you start seeing, well, we have to start making concessions somewhere. We start having to cut back in some areas to make other areas work and so on and so on. Um, and you're kind of creating an environment where you're just asking for something to tragically go wrong. We can also throw in the civil rights and equality issues at this time. Uh, when times are good, black and white men are separate entities, and the two should never mix, i.e., the Jim Crow laws. But when a world war breaks out, some aspects of segregation fly out the windows. Yes, uh, white and black men in World War I were kept in separate divisions and everything. Uh, that's where we get uh blackjack Pershing from. Um, very, very interesting guy in history. But ultimately, you had black men fighting uh in Europe for you know for America, the same way that the whites were fighting. The idea that only white men could die in battle turns into all men can die in battle. So, like everybody is expendable, not just one or the other. Uh suddenly the idea that all men have red blood and were bonded by that fact is super important. But when the war is over, everything goes back to normal and segregation uh trends come back. This made its way into the great train wreck of 1918. Notice how most of the people who died in the train wreck were black, they were heading to a remote location to make munitions for the war effort uh for a better pay. Um, that's you know, that's what they were trying to pull off or trying to capitalize on the moment. But equality stopped at the train station where these black men and women had to be separated from white folks uh to sit in train cars that were the most likely to receive the brunt of the impact if one happened. So you have this demand on infrastructure, you have this demand on transportation, you have this demand on manufacturing and people and everybody being pushed to the limits, and then you have you know the idea that oh, wait, we're at war, so we're gonna put black men wherever is necessary, whether it's overseas to go fight in a war or at home making munitions. Again, you'll notice that they sent the black men and women to go work in the munitions factory, where if it did catch fire, gone. And the idea was that they are more expendable than than white people, and that made its way into the train stations, which is the reason why you saw so many black men, a woman, and a baby die in this event. So looking at the train system of the time, we're seeing more and more cases of multiple engines being used on a single track, uh, thus increasing the likelihood of a head-on collision. I and I think that's kind of where the dumpster fire sits. It's just like you're asking so much of everything that something like this is bound to happen. That that that's all there is to it. And then who's ultimately going to pay the price? Yeah, it says 101 men and women that paid the price. And I think it was a total of a hundred and twenty-one that died because there were some folks that passed uh a little while after the incident, like their injuries were just too great. So yeah, I think it was like a total of 120 out of like 180 people total. Yes, protocols were put in place to prevent such a tragedy, but the demand on the rail system was so strong that even protocols began to fail. With the increased demand, we see a rise in complexification. Just look at the math problem at the beginning of this episode. Yeah, it was intended to be funny and reminiscent of the horrors of our childhood math classes, but it's also a real problem that people had to figure out back then. Not so much today, but back then, like I mentioned earlier, these conductors could probably look at that and be like, oh yeah, this is easy. And this leads me to my final point. A tragedy such as this is the tip of an iceberg. Underneath it is a mass social, it is a mass of social issues, technological issues, engineering issues, logistical issues that support the tip of the iceberg. Literally, like the two train engines colliding and forming that upside down V for a few moments. That it that when I when I read that, that reminded me of the tip of an iceberg. In previous episode, often easy to pinpoint the one person who could have done something different to prevent everything from falling apart. But in this case, it's not so easy. It's we we can't just blame one person, but we as a species would prefer to do that. It's easier, it's more convenient in our heads to be like, that's the guy. I know he's dead, but ruined his reputation. That makes us feel better. It's the same way we see this phenomenon in crime where a family member is murdered and the wrong guy or the wrong suspect is captured and thrown in jail. Even if that is the wrong person that got thrown in jail, the fact that the family who lost that family member feels better that some degree of justice has taken place, even though it's the wrong guy. Uh, this has actually come up a couple of times in history, which is the reason why in American criminal law you are innocent until proven guilty, so that we can avoid just like for the sake of arresting somebody, arresting the wrong person, just so that we could have some sort of justice. Uh it's crazy how the how the human brain works like that. Uh, David's Kennedy was smeared through the newspapers, and his life after death was just as dead to the country as his physical body. Could he have done things differently? Yeah. Uh, so could the hundreds of thousands of other people across the nation who are also trying to make things work with what they had. Trains have a number of figures that give dispatchers an idea of what they were working with, is called tonnage. And it determines the weight of the train and therefore what needs to be adjusted to put in place to make things work. Does it need another engine? Uh, what's it going to be a stopping distance? How many cars can it pull on top of it? Um, all that kind of stuff. And the spirit of the railway theme of this episode, the great train wreck of 1918 was pulling a significant amount of historical tonnage when those two trains crashed head on. That historical tonnage was released at once for historians to pick through and try to clean up and make sense of. For me, the evisceration of the historical tonnage on July 9th, 1918 brought the country together for at least one day, where everyone on that cornfield were Americans and human beings, and people forgot about racial uh proclivities and all that fun stuff. I've been doing the show for a while now and have studied a lot of historical dumpster fires, and I would say that most of the time the dumpster fires uh need to be put out as a like fast as possible before another dumpster fire starts. However, I have come across a few cases like this one. The dumpster fire is a reminder that humans are humans, and sometimes the best thing to do is to pick up where we left off, but try and also take some of the good things with us. Like if this event that brought you know those tens of thousands of people together on that cornfield, and regardless of skin color and all that kind of stuff, if that was enough to make the entire nation think the same way as those men and women did on that one day, I feel like this whole nation, a lot of the problems that we have today would have never even happened. So, yeah, it's an interesting case. Uh on paper, it's really easy to kind of pinpoint the dumpster fire. But I think this is also a case of there's so much more going on in a culture and in a society and an economy, um, that an event like this is just reflective of everything else that is going on because of all the things that that play into it. So um leave us a comment on what you think is the actual cause. Uh let me know if I'm completely out of touch with reality, um, if I'm becoming too much of a humanist, or you agree with me, or you know, maybe you know something that I didn't catch up on when I was saying this, like you know, aliens. I mean, hey, why not? Maybe the aliens cause all this from space. They were jealous of all the cows that we have, and maybe those aliens were trying to get rid of people from eating those cows. I don't know. Uh, I'm just pulling stuff out of my out of my rear. Uh, yeah, leave us a comment on what you think is the real cause of this dumpster fire. Be sure to check us out on the Dave Sumpsterfire.com. It's a nice little website where you can find our back catalog, our show notes, other readings. Uh, it's where you can also find Kara's artwork and whatnot on there. Be sure to send us an email at the DaveSdumpster Fire Gmail.com. Let us know what you think. If you have ideas, uh, let us know. Um, I think Kara's going to be back in a week or so. So you should actually hear her angelic voice uh for the next episode. Uh, she better have something ready because I've done like the past five episodes by myself and uh I need a break. So, yeah, hopefully she'll be back for the next one. So, in the meantime, keep it a hot mess. I appreciate you uh sticking around for my my attempt at a solo show. Hopefully, I didn't bore you all to death. But yeah, uh love you all muchly, and uh we will catch you on the next one. Bye.