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Oh hey, it's your great grandpa's granddaughter who's also your wife, but whatever, because it's the seventeen hundred's Alie Ward and that'll make sense later. Back with another episode of Ologies. So this time we are off the rails with a real first class episode about train stuff, all kinds of train stuff. Who But before we get to this interview, some quick business. So thank you to patrons. I see you, I appreciate you. You make this podcast happen every week.
I would not be able to pay an editor. Hi, Stephen, what's up to make the show without you? Guys? So patrons get extra content, They get to submit their questions to ologists ahead of time. They get some AMA videos once a month, in which I'm usually disheveled, and maybe two candid But that's part of what you get. If you ever want to spot other oligites in the wild. There are t shirts and hats and bathing suits, etc.
Pins at ologiesmerch dot com and on Mondays. I post your photos on the ologies Instagram in the things, So if you wear ologies merch around, just let me see it. Let me see it, kiddos, let me look at it. Also, I'll be in Portland on September fifteenth for an event called camp Ologies. It's a one day thing with some ologists who will be there. There's gonna be some weird crafting, a lot of science gabbing, some games, generally just an excuse to make new friends in the woods. And tickets
are forty bucks. I'm excited to see some of you there. Also, thank you for rating and reviewing and subscribing and keeping ologies in like the top twenty or so science podcast on iTunes with all the big shows that have like staffs and record in not closets. I'm somewhat, I would say, I'm I'm in the orange area on a scale of creepiness, not quite red, but I'm an orange. And I read all of your reviews because it's just so nice that you leave them, and so to prove it, I read
a fresh one each week. This one is from m Soldier sixteen. They say this podcast is such an easy listen. It makes the most ordinary and seemingly uninteresting topics seem like that little thing you've been missing your life. Would rate six stars if possible. Thank you. I'm Soldier sixteen. If you're like I don't think i'd be into this topic, go back and listen to it. I hide some weird stuff in there for everyone. Okay, Pharaoh equnology, y'all, this
is the best etymology you will ever hear. It doesn't get better. This is gonna be the best one. So let's do a drum roll before I break it down. It means iron horse, Pharaoh equin iron horse and it's the study of trains. Hulking, puffing, crushing, tireless, history, altering trains. Okay, So Wendy at the Henry Ford Museum sets me up with a Pharaoh equinologist, and this dude is responsible for the care of a priceless collection of historical cars and planes,
several locomotives, and an operational steam train. More on why that's like a huge deal later. And the last time I went to the Ford, I stood staring up at this massive coal powered steam locomotive, the Alleghany, which is two stories tall. It's as long as a twelve story building, and it could pull one hundred and sixty cars full of coal up the Appalachian Mountains. Train nerds, it's a two sixty six with a power output of seventy five
hundred horsepower. Non train nerds, that's as technical as this episode really gets. I'll be honest with you. I just wanted to make everyone happy, Okay. Anyway, I was like, who trains what? So we met up in this little classroom off the main museum entrance, and this guy has been on TV so much talking about transportation history that he is able to produce concise factually accurate soundbites with correct dates. She's like a tennis ball machine. He's amazing.
He's an absolutely inexhaustible treasure trove of train facts. So let's not miss this old bored for pharaoh equinologist Matt Anderson, how do you feel about the term pharaoh equinologist? Do you love it as much as I do?
I love it. It's a lot of fun to say, and it's one of those terms that you know, when people first hear it, they're absolutely confused by it, but then when you break it down, makes perfect sense.
Right what iron horse? Is that what they were called initially?
Yes? Yeah, they were referred to as iron horses, and any Western movie that you watch, you know, they talk about the iron horse and so forth. But it's a logical, I think, description of a locomotive.
Oh one hundred percent. When I found out that a pharaoheconologist was a word, I lost my marbles. I was like, you're kidding me, that's amazing. We never thought of That's a genius. Okay. So once you have secured the most eneviable business card, what kinds of jobs can you do as a pharaoh equinologist and what's your title here.
I'm Curator of Transportation here at the Henry Ford.
How long have you had this job.
I've had this job now for about six and a half years.
Really, yeah, was it your dream?
It was. I grew up in Michigan, not not in Detroit, but we used to drive down here every summer to visit the museum in the village, So a chance to come work here was a dream come true.
So did you see some of these trains when you were growing up, the same ones that you are in charge of?
I did. I have a picture of my office of me as a six year old boy standing on the pilot of the Alleghany. So it's nice. It's very cool to come back here and now get to work with it every day.
So did you do you realize when you were growing up that that was making that much of an imprint or how do you become an transportation enthusiast who turns into a job.
Yeah, the enthusiast part's easy, right. So I've been into trains and cars really since since Boywood. But you know, I never really considered that people actually made a living at museums, So it never occurred to me until I
actually went to college. I initially was going to be a high school history teacher and then took a class called Intro to Public History and learned about this idea of working in museums, archives, libraries and thought, you know, that might be kind of fun, and so far it has been so quick.
Shout out to the Museology episode with Ronnie Klein, who breaks down what it's like to work behind the scenes of all the exhibits that the rest of us aren't allowed to touch but really want to like so bad. Okay, Matt, Now, when you were growing up, were you into trains?
I was, Yes, took my first train ride at two years old and absolutely loved watching them go by, riding them, anything they had to do with them, playing them certainly. So definitely.
Why do you think people like trains so much? Because I feel like there's two kinds of people. There are people who are into trains, and then there are people who are like, what, Yeah, trains are cool, like train enthusias are into it. Like what happens to get people so into trains?
Yeah? Well I've got sort of my enlightened intelligent answer, and then I've got my gut answer. I think the enlightened answer would be the trains are really unique in American history, and that they're so closely tied with the history of this country. I mean, we've had railroads for all but fifty years that we've had a nation, and you think about the role they played in the Civil War,
you think about the trans Continental Railroad. The effects they had really even into the early twentieth century is really really fascinating study. But I think the simple answers. You know, we're just fascinated by big things, and on land you can't find anything much bigger than a train. It's just incredibly impressive. It's kind of awesome to see one, to feel one. You know, you feel trucks and cars, but not the way you feel a train, which kind of
rumbles in your chest even before you see it. So that's that's an amazing thing.
I never thought about that, about the really visceral experience of having a train go by.
Yeah, it's really you know, and you go to a roilroad crossing and there's almost this builds in climax. You know, you hear the bells and the lights starving kind of builds up the anticipation. Then you hear the whistle in the distance or the horn, and then yeah, the ground shakes underneath you as this thing goes by, and you just hear the rumble of that diesel motor. It's a lot of fun.
So side note, at least one person has been identified as being in a monogamous relationship with a steamy locomotive. So this German Man nam Joaquin does admit though, that he has this affinity for fixing things and that can lead to emotional infidelity with other objects. And a California woman named Carol is married to a train station in
San Diego. She rides a bus forty five minutes a day just to hang out in the station and touch the walls and talk about our day, which honestly sounds like a healthier relationship than a lot of people have. I have never dated anyone who would ride the bus that long to kick it with me, especially while I was at work multitasking. Did you grow up with train tracks near you? Did you hear them or see them growing up?
Yes?
Yeah, we had train tracks not too far from where I was, And I grew up in a town that had two railroads and kind of typical of American cities, and we lost one of our railroads in the nineteen eighties. A lot of lines have now been abandoned as the railroads have kind of consolidated their operations. But now I would run out and watch watch trains on both of them, a lot of fun.
What was the dumbest thing you ever put on a track?
To be honest, like like everyone, of course, I put my share of coins on a railroad track, you know, to watch the pennies and the nickels get flattened. And you know, I probably shouldn't say this for publication, but at one point a group of friends of mine actually put jumper cables on a railroad track near a railroad crossing to activate the crossing. Is you know, fun to experiment how do those things work? And that did it, so you know, it was a lightly used line. We
didn't it was in the middle of the night. We didn't put anyone in danger, but it was it was kind of fun to do.
Do I need to tell you not to do this, because don't do this. Don't do this. Also, with the distraction of the Internet, now kids would probably be like, uugh, that pray is way too much work. It's too much laborious mischief. They run on electricity.
The Yeah, the crossing signals are actually completed by what an effect is a short circuit caused by the metal train axle in the wheels passing over the track. So you jumper cable can create that same effect.
I had no idea.
Yeah, don't try this at home.
But yeah, did you go and find the coins after you flatten them?
Of course? Yeah? Yeah, and they fell off the tracks. You had to dig through the ballast and the stones, but I pulled them out. You know, it's amazing. There was really nothing recognizable of those coins after the train went over them.
Oh man, quick aside for real, though, playing on train tracks super dangerous. People have suffered fatal consequences by putting even a penny on the track and then standing on another track not knowing which track the train was barreling down. So maybe outsource the work man. Pinterest led me to a designer in the tumbleweed strewn wilds of West Texas who sells necklaces hand fashioned from low sourced quote train squashed pennies off the railroad tracks in Marfa sixty bucks.
Pretty cute. Speaking of dusty vistas and westward expansion, I asked Matt for a quick history lesson, and he delivered. Now, can you give me a little bit? I know this is like a huge question. I get this is a huge question. Can you give me your cocktail party history of trains in America?
I could?
You know.
I think the railroad as a concept as we understand it today really starts in eighteen twenty eight with the Baltimore, Ohio Railroad, which was the first common carrier railroad in the US, which means it wasn't just hauling stones from a quarry or a coal from a mine, but it
was carrying all kinds of freight. And it fascinates me that the first stone, the ceremonial cornerstone for that railroad, was laid by a man named Charles Carroll of Carrollton, who at that time was the last living signer of the Declaration of Independence.
So I was like, ooh, maybe I'll find out like a fun fact about this Charles Carroll of Carrollton, and puh boy, howdy kiddos did I Okay, I'm gonna be quick. First off, he was the wealthiest of all the founding fathers, with a fortune equivalent now to about half a billion dollars. He was from Maryland. He thought slaves should be freed,
but not his what. He also married his friend and the mary married cousins had seven kids, most of which didn't make it, but one son was kind of like a rich n'er Dowell like you would expect to see in like an eighties movie about a frustrated rich father with like a deadbeat kid, or like now in like high political office. Anyway, Chucky c had a remarkable shelf life and lived pretty much for an eternity, like this
guy was like in a live mummy. And so when it was time to lay the first railroad brick, they were like haul out Charles Carroll of Carrolton, that was his official name. Let's get him up here. He's ninety one years young. Let's see him. He lived to ninety five until he didn't, and then there was a national day of mourning. Okay, that was a lot of information. But let's hop the bullet train to Inpoville. Because Matt
is a walking encyclopedia. He's about to give us the most succinct railroad history lesson maybe ever, you've.
Got this direct link to fourth of July seventeen seventy six here at the start of the railroads. It's a great way I think of kind of passing the torch to the next generation in American history. And then, yeah, from their lines kind of built up around the United States. They started as regional affairs, like that that B and O was supposed to connect Baltimore with the Ohio River. Other small states and communities built their railroads. In Michigan,
we had fairly early railroads. Our first line was built in eighteen thirty seven and we had only been a state for a year at that point, basically. And then those smaller lines start to grow into each other and consolidate. The Civil War, I think is a big turning point too, and then after that you've got things like and here gauge now where railroads aren't aren't some of the more six feet before, some of them four feet eight and a half inches. They all became the same gauge, so
we have a real interchangeable network. And then they peak right about nineteen fifteen, nineteen sixteen with the maximum mileage in the US. And then from that point it's been a slow story of kind of abandonment of lines or backtracking. If you're pardon the expression. And of course a lot of that is because of the automobile and then later airplanes as well, But railroads are still a vital part of American life today. We just don't think of them.
They're They're like the plumbing in our house, you know, you just you take it for granted until something goes wrong.
Oh god, that's true. Now is it hard for you because you also curate automobiles here? Do you have something in your head that's like a little trains versus cars? Like, are you ever are you ever like a little pod at cars? Because of how they took over for trades.
You know, I do wish that we had the robust passenger network that we had, you know, even just fifty sixty years ago, that we just don't have today. I Mean, amtrack is out there, but it's really a skeleton of what we once had to It would be nice to hop into a train sometimes and take a trip, you know, some distance, rather than having to drive there. So yeah, there's a little bit of meus like that. But you know, I also realized that railroads had a part in popularizing
the automobile. You know, they saw the car not as an enemy when it first appeared, but they saw it as a possible ally, you know, farmers can bring goods from their farm to our depot rather than us having to build all these little branch lines that don't make enough money for us. But obviously cars grew a little farther beyond what road then is paid.
And now what happens to abandon railroad lines? Like are they paved over? Are they just kind of sitting there? And like maybe we'll use them later with different types of locomotives.
Yeah, We've got a great program in this country called Rails Trails, the Rails to Trails Contrivancy, which has argued for the preservation of these corridors and a lot of them, particularly here in Michigan, where we've had a lot of lines abandoned, get paved over and turned into all purpose recreational trails, so for biking, jogging, hiking, you name it. So it's a great use.
Side note, I had to see what they look like, so I checked the Instagram hashtagacy if anyone else had even heard of this, and hi, hello, there were like thirty four thousand photos tagged rails to trails. Good God, the Majesty. There's like tunnels and lush greenery and biking and trestles you can walk over. And so I went to railstotrails dot org and they have this interactive map. You can click your state, you can find all the
abandoned railway lines you can hike on. And I started getting I'm not kidding you, stomach cramps from excitement just because it looks so beautiful. But then looking at and retracing these abandoned tracks, it's a weird, kind of chilling reflection on late eighteen hundred's westward expansion in America. There's
so much history there. Between eighteen seventy and nineteen hundred, the railroads helped millions of East Coast Americans and immigrants head west into the sunset, but not without a steep and just tragic price paid by native populations. And as long as we're brushing briefly up on American history, a note about the underground Railroad. Now, this was an escape network that freed, by some estimates, up to one hundred
thousand slaves in America. Former slave abolitionist and activist Harry Tubman herself made thirteen trips to the South to free seventy slaves but fyi, the underground railroad was neither literally underground, nor was it a railroad. It was a secret movement, yes, and it used rail terminology as code, like the terms stations and conductors hence the day. So these are topics that deserve their own in depth future episodes, and they
will get them. But anyway, go rail to trail yourself, because it's very beautiful.
Theoretically, those corridors are then preserved, so if we find a need for the railroads later, we can put them back together and relay the track. But politically, I'm not sure how well that could happen, because people get so attached to those trails that they will not want the railroad to come back in if we ever get to that point. So who knows.
And now, what happened in motor cities where you see kind of a robust rail line and then cars start to take over, like in Los Angeles? What happened to the train system in Los Angeles or Detroit once the automobile came around? Did it kind of phase it out more aggressively, more intentionally?
Yeah, the automobile came a bad time for railroads, obviously bringing in all this change. But not long after the automobile peers on the scene, we have the Great Depression, where already we have railroad lines and streetcar operators suffering from losing traffic to the automobile, but now they've got this additional impact of the Great Depression. So they go through that period really not being able to invest in improve their equipment or improve the track and so forth.
And then they get hit with World War Two, which all of a sudden there's now curbs on automobile transportations, there's rationing, so people aren't driving. They're going back to street cars, back to railroads, and now railroads, having suffered through the depression, are kind of getting beat by too much traffic. And you have to feel bad for some of the lines which thought that this is kind of a rebirth of railroad passenger service, so they invest in
new equipment at this time. But then, of course, as soon as the war's over, everybody wants a new car and they get them, and then we're off fund the interstate highways and here we.
Are, so to recap that, everyone said to trains like, later, loser, I'm in a car, and then they were like, never mind, I'm back. We can't have cars because everyone is off killing each other. And the rail system was like, ah, you came back to me. I'm so happy I made you dinner. I needed you a card again with our initials, I'm investing so much into myself for your return. And then the war was over and we were like, psych, you suck. I'm spending my American dollars on metal cars.
And the railroads were like, heart, it is broken. So what's going to happen? Is there another act before the credits roll on our romance with trains? Now? Do you get excited about the future of rail like are you all up in hyper loop news or are you like I'm strictly like terrestrial railroad vintage style.
You know, it's interesting to read about these new technologies hyper loop, maglev, whatever it might be. But then, you know, I also think that we've got to proven technology in the railroad with the infrastructure already built. And yeah, it would be cool to ride in something that goes four hundred miles an hour, but I'd be perfectly happy with one hundred and fifty miles on our traditional railroad route. So we'll see what happens.
Before we can get off track. Let's just pump the brakes and cover quickly. How the hell does the train work? Okay, here's the deal, So super train enthusiasts, you are going to think this is too simple. If you notify me telling me that this impo is too broad, I will simply respond with a link to Wikipedia. I just needed to know the So I'm gonna give you guys really broad strokes. Now. The first, like air quotes, trains were just rutways in the roads in Roman times that carts
could kind of just shimmey down with ease. And then in the fifteen hundreds in Germany they started pulling bins full of stuff on tracks by hands, and they called these huns. One hundred years later they were like, this is bull crap. Let's use horses, and they made things called wagonways. Now, in the seventeen hundreds, a Scottish dude named James Watt invented the steam engine. Coal or wood is burned, which heats water, which powers motors to do things.
Cut to eighteen oh four, the first steam locomotive hauled iron in Wales, and then by the eighteen thirties they were like, well, shoot, let's stuff some people in these ding Dan cars, and then in the late eighteen hundreds, other power sources started cropping up, like electric diesel engines. Twenties nineteen thirties, diesel starts to take over. It's cleaner and more efficient, and steam engines begin to decline. Now
electric powered subways and streetcars. They work by running on rails and they grab power from the third rail or from wires overhead. Bullet trains like those in Japan and France, which rule those start cropping up in the late nineteen sixties nineteen seventies. They have speeds of over two hundred kilometers per hour. That's almost one hundred and forty miles per hour. That was a big deal back then. And then maglev trains kind of rounded the corner in a blur.
If you're like, what is a maglev? Maglev is short for magnetic levitation, and that's because it's a floating in air people. Welcome to the future. So magnets levitate the train just a little bit, and then another set of
magnets pull it forward. And the first commercial maglev train debuted in Shanghai on New Year's Day two thousand and four, and the latest train speed record was set by a Japanese maglev bullet train in twenty fifteen that went six hundred and three kilometers per hour, That is three hundred and seventy five miles per hour.
Perty good, perty purty, pirty perty good.
It's not as good as like a Boeing seven forty seven, which has a cruising speed of like five hundred and fifty miles per hour, or as fast as an actual bullet which rolls at like seventeen hundred miles per hour. But personally, I'd rather ride the rails than deal with flight delace or I guess if we're following this comparison, a very fast gunshot. So way to go maglev. Now what's next. A lot of folks are working to make
Elon Musk's hyper loop fever dreams a reality. Now this would be modular passenger pods that speed they hope at like seven hundred mi miles per hour in a vacuum chambered tube propelled by maglev. Now tests are happening in Nevada deserts all over the world. They're trying to figure this out. I for one, am ready for this miracle of speed to happen to my travel, but but I guess that would mean less epically long train journeys. What's the longest train trip you've ever taken.
I've taken several trips from say this part of the country out to Washington, d C. So not long. This is not going over the whole country. But you know, it's a nice overnight trip. You don't get too cramped in the train, and you wake up, you're refreshed, and you know you've gotten there and you've traveled when you otherwise would have been sleeping. So it's not as though you lose any time on an overnight train trip like that.
I was going to do a helpful aside here about how if you do overnights, get the sleeper car, blah blah blah, it's worth it. But the real news is that I found out that a lot of trains have a hopper system for the toilets, which mean they just dump it out raw on the tracks, like bye bye. And I found that out from a site called toiletguru dot com, where this one random dude just answers everyone's
questions about toilets. And on that site, I also learned that Hitler's toilet resides in a very Grimy auto repair shop in Florence, New Jersey, where it was actively casually in use for years. And that's very weird and also fitting for someone who has a legacy of being the world's biggest turd. Anyway, let's get into some nuts and bolts of interesting terminology, train language, trainlage. If you will, shall we? Okay? Can you give me a little bit
of an overview of what a train is? Because I learned recently that the train and the locomotive are two different things. Train enthusiasts are like, how dare you not know that? But can you give me the parts of a train anatomy?
Yes, nothing drives a paraoeconologists more crazy than people calling locomotives trains. But yes, the locomotive is just the engine, whether it's a diesel electric or a steam locomotive, that in itself is not a train. It's not until you couple cars to it that you have a train. So it's the locomotive and the freight cars, the passenger cars, whatever it might be. All of those together form a train.
And now what's that caboos doing? Is it? Whatever? The last car is a caboose or does a kabooz have to be read and cute.
Cabooses tend to be read and cute, just because red was a fairly inexpensive paint color and it was highly visible, and the point is to make the end of the train visible to following trains in case of some kind of emergency stop or something. But yeah, the caboose is much lamented. Those started to fade away by the late seventies early eighties. Now they're all but extinct, except for local trains or maybe moving through rail yards or something.
But yeah, every time I see a train go by without a caboose, it feels like, you know, reading a sentence without the period at the end. It's just not complete.
It's like texting grammar.
Yeah, that's right.
What okay, I never knew that. Also, I just looked it up and the word caboose was lifted from ship talk that was the little room that sailors would cook in, probably from some Dutch word, and it's used in train language because the caboose was the hangout car for the crew. Isn't that cute? They're like, I'll be in the back, gonna go kick it in the last car. Also in
Bronx Pennsylvania. There's a place called the Red Kaboos Motel that began when a guy in the nineteen sixties on a dare bid on nineteen cabooses in an auction and to his shock, learned that he won them. So he was like, uh. He turned him into a hotel at which you can still stay. It's like one hundred and sixteen dollars a night. They also have a honeymoon sweet caboose with a jacuzzi tub. Just saying I think you should spend your wedding night there. You don't have to
take the suggestion, but maybe you should. But really like check the Yelp reviews first, because I don't want to run anything. Now, what happens when trained enthusiasts or pharaoh or fellow pharaoh equnologists get together? What are those parties? Like?
They're pretty fun. You know, there's a lot of slide showing and nowadays, you know, show your pictures on the computer. What have your joe? You know, look at this train I rode, or look at this great photo of the composition of the image that I captured. You know, I waited in the rain for three hours to get this shot.
And that's what they do, or there's talk about the history of railroads, or a lot of them are model railroaders, so they talk about what they've been doing out there, or show you the latest improvements of the model road, or you dream a little bit about things you'd like to do, like to see railroads in China were still using steam until very recently. You know, people will travel to those places just to have that experience.
Okay, now what about model trains. Do people like the hands on experience? Maybe we all love playing god a little.
Yeah, the model railroad allows you to kind of play trains, to live out that that fantasy that you've always had. You know, as a kid, I had model trains. I didn't do much more than just run them around as fast as I could for fun. But some of these modelers they get seriously into it, you know, in that they actually run freight on their model railroad, and they dispatch the trains and they switch out the cars. You know, heaven forbid you touch a car, pick it up by hand.
You've got to move it, just like the railroad with a locomotive. So that's pretty serious stuff. You know, It's still play, but at a far more advanced level than what we were doing as kids.
So the Henry Ford Museum has this whole area of model trains overseen by at least when I last went, some kind white haired gents who were eager, as I'll get out to answer questions. So my main question was do you ever get on the tables and stomp on these like Godzilla? But I wanted to preserve the mystery, so I didn't ask, when you are taking care of the locomotives here, which you have known personally since you were like six, what does that involve? Because the locomotives
that you have at the Ford are massive. What do you have to do to keep those up? Do you have to dust them? Do you have to make sure that squirrels don't live in them? What do you have oil them? What happens?
We are lucky in that a lot of our signature locomotives, particularly the Allegheny, that massive. When we have on the floor that has always been inside for as long as we've had it, and that's one of the real challenges with rail preservation. These things are just so big, and you leave them outside, they get exposed to weather and
over time they're going to degrade. So We're lucky there's not too much we have to do with the Allegheny other than maybe dust it off a little bit, or because the cab is open and kids can climb up there, we've got to make sure that there's no damage. We have replaced all the controls with replicas, so you know, if something gets broken, it's not damaging an original piece.
It's a different story for our operating steam railroad out in Greenfield Village there, we do have a crew of locomotive specialists who are out there working on those locomotives every day, maintaining them, oiling them, cleaning them, cleaning out the ash, doing regular maintenance with them. And we like to say out there we're not just preserving the equipment,
we're preserving the skills. I mean, there's nowhere else in the country other than at railroad museums where people are doing that kind of work every day.
Oh that's a good point. So hot tip, Pharaoh equa files to work in a ding dang museum. Dig into your scrapbooks. I feel like an employer can't turn you down if you have a picture of yourself as a human puppy sitting on their exhibit, like legally they can't say, no, how many trains in locomotives you have here at the museum, and do you have a favorite?
Yeah, I would pick My favorite would be the sentimental one, the Allegaty, which I think a lot of people would pick as our favorite just because it's so massive. But we have a large collection here. We've got off the top of my head, we have about seven or so locomotives, closer to ten when you count the diesel electrics. A few of them operate, most of them are just static displays. And then we have several cars beyond that, passenger cars,
freight cars, box cars. We have two cabooses, for example, and they run the gamut from a replica of an eighteen sixty Civil War era passenger coach up to Henry Ford's private railcar that he used, which was the equivalent of the lear jet of the nineteen teens in nineteen twenties.
Wait, you could have your own private railcar where you're just like, hey, I'm going to roll up with my railcar. Take me over here. It's like your second home.
Yes, if you had sufficient means, you could buy your own railcar. I think he paid something like one hundred and fifty thousand and four, which sounds like a bargain today, but of course in nineteen fifteen sixteen, that would have been big money.
Oh my god, god, FYI, I asked a website, and by today's standards, that would be equivalent to a train car costing three point seven million dollars, which is like the cost of a small private jet. Yeah that's Oprah money.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And they would just put it onto the back of a regularly scheduled train and you could ride in privacy off to New York or Washington wherever you might be going.
Oh that's the way to live. I mean, it is funny that a dude who pretty much invented the automotive industry, it was like, I'm just going to hop a train. We do them both. Now, where do you guys get these locomotives? Do you buy them on Craigslist? Where do they come from?
We've gotten them from a variety of places. The Allegheny again as an example, we got from the CNO Railway itself, the company that bought that locomotive. And it's a great story with that engine because the CNO hauled coal, so you know, they were resistant to adoptees a electric locomotives. They stuck with steam because of some loyalty to their primary business there. But the Alleghany was built in nineteen forty one. We got it in nineteen fifty six ers.
So that's you know, fifteen years of operation, which is not long at all for a locomotive. Typically they'll run for decades, not just fifteen years.
This was retired just four years older than my current two thousand and seven PRIs.
Yeah, they kind of gave up the ghost on Cole decided to move to diesel electrics, so we got that from the railroad. We've got another locomotive, which we got from a local energy company here which used it as a switching locomotive in their own yard. We've got other pieces that have come in some cases from private collectors, people who bought this equipment and then for whatever reason, decided they didn't want it anymore, then gave it to us.
Have you ever cried about a train?
I have cried sometimes about just the passing of the railroad in general. Like I talked about those two lines that grew up in my hometown. You know, I had a favorite between the two and of course, the favorite is the one that's abandoned now. So you know, it's sad to think because I would just love to be able to ride that line again, to go that route, travel that distance, and I think it probably is never coming back at this point, so it's just just exists in memory.
I wonder if a lot of people do long, transc undental hikes on abandoned railroads. I know that you said that they were turning them maybe into trails, but if anyone's like, I'm going to traverse the country based on the old rail lines, there.
Are people who do that. And you know, rail lines really do make ideal hiking trails because they go off into some very wild areas. You get some beautiful scenic views that you can't get from the expressway or anywhere else. And also because they're designed for railers, they tend to be fairly leveled too, that the grades are not steep, they're very gentle.
Did you watch Stami Me as a kid.
I did, Yes. I think about that scene when they're on the bridge they're running from the locomotive. Yeah, we've all had nightmares like that.
I think, have you ever gone to drive a locomotive?
I have. Actually I got a chance to fire on a steam locomotive once, which hotter than hell, if I'm saying miserable. In fact, our own crew, it's been in the nineties here in the Detroit area the last couple of days. They were talking about in the cab. They measured it at one hundred and thirty five hundred and thirty six degrees I think. And they're working in those conditions throughout the day, so a lot of water and
a lot of rest breaks. But yes, I got to shovel coal into a locomotive, which is far more challenging that you might think. It's not just shoveling coal into the hole and that's it. You've got to get that coal spread evenly inside the firebox. So there's some real skill in it. And I also got to operate a
diesel electric locomotive, which is a lot of fun. And the big takeaway from me from that was how quickly those locomotives can get away from you, even the slightest till you pick up speed very quickly, and you start to realize what a skill it is to control that much weight. And you know, I was just running the locomotive, no cars behind it, so it would have been even more difficult in that situation.
So side note. I got to drive a locomotive once, just like a few hundred feet on a test track, and I just hooted the horn the entire time, and I have no regrets. How do they test people's ability to drive a locomotive, because that seems like a thing like you can't just go practice at a church parking lot, like when you're getting your drivers, Like, how do you learn how to do that without killing everyone?
Yeah, it's equivalent to an apprentice program, whether it's on the actual operating business railroads or on a railroad like ours here at Greenfield Village. You know, you've learned under the study of someone who knows what they're doing, and you learn by doing, going through the experience, practicing, and eventually, you know, you get to the point where you don't need the apprentice supervision anymore and you're off on your own.
Who so you just have to watch over someone's shoulder. It's kind of like learning to be a surgeon, I guess also, and I had nowhere else in this episode to put it, so I'm just going to add it here. The Hogwarts Express train is an actual steam locomotive in Scotland. You can ride it. It's called the Jacobite and it even crosses the bridge to Hogwarts, which is a twenty one arch viaduct. Just in case you're like, oh no, my bucket list, I have done all the items. Well
there's new one, kiddos. Okay, let's get to the rapid fire around. But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners, we're going to take a quick break for sponsors of the show. Sponsors. Why sponsors, You know what they do? They help us give money to different share every week. So if you want to know where Ologies gives our money, you can go to alleyword dot com
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Okay, your question. We got a truly staggering number of questions. Okay, Spencer Toth wants to know why was I told as a child that putting salt on a train track was illegal?
That's an interesting question. I would say it's probably because putting anything on a train track is illegal. You know, theoretically, even being near the train track is illegal. It's private property.
Oh no, oops, this gets sad.
The railroad owns that corridor and for obvious reasons. I mean, it's very dangerous to walk too close to those when a train is coming, and it's surprising the number of pedestrian fatalities there are. And you know, theoretically, anybody in that situation, it's the pedestrian's faul because they shouldn't have been there in the first place. But now we have people who are you know, tuned out of the world,
listening to their iPhones and so forth. And yeah, even for as large as they are, you know, a fast moving train can sneak up on you much faster than you might think.
So, right, so it's illegal to breathe on a rail.
He would be theoretically, Yeah.
Just in case you're like tempting the grim Reaper by train sounds relatively unthreatening. Just please know that the Federal Rail Administration says that train related deaths are at a ten year high. Almost nine hundred people in the US were killed due to train related incidents last year, five hundred and seventy five of them trespassers abundantly in their twenties and thirties, walking on active tracks or hopping freight trains.
And I went to do a little bit more research, which landed me on a Wikipedia page called list of selfie related injuries and Deaths. And it was really sad. I could not read through it all. Let's just say I did glance and I saw the word train a lot. So, kiddos, playing on trains is statistically one hundred times more likely to kill you than a shark. If I may get some lack of morphological on you. Now, if you want a selfie with a train, go to a museum. Don't
do any trespassing on any tracks. Okay, that's because I care about you, love dad.
Really, the only place you can be is if you're at a crossing. In that case, you shouldn't be stopping you. You should be just crossing and going about your business.
So no salts on train tracks. Also, no people on train tracks. Al Martinez wants to know what's the current thinking on high speed rail in the US, both across the country in high population states such as California, Florida, Texas.
Yeah, we've got some movement toward high speed rail here, though our high speed rail is a shadow of what they have in Europe, where they're doing two hundred miles an hour or better. Here, you know, one hundred and twenty miles is considered pretty high speed, and we've had
some success in short corridors. The difficulty is that Amtrak runs on a lot of freight owned railroads, and of course the freight operators want to run freight trains on there too, and high speed passenger trains and slower speed freight trains don't mix well as you might imagine.
Whoa That speed difference was news to me, although thinking of huge bins of coal on like a bullet train does seem a little excessive.
That's why, really the Northeast Corridor between Washington and Boston now is really the showpiece because Amtrak owns most of that right of way, so they can run at whatever speeds they want.
Oh, I never knew that. I always wondered why California's train game was just so poor.
Yeah, no, they have to share the space. And of course those and a lot of cases those tracks were built or at least the right of ways were laid out in the nineteenth century, so they were designed for slower speeds, and if you want to run at higher speeds, you need longer, straighter stretches to track more gentle curves, so a lot of that has to be rebuilt. That's why it's just in some cases simpler to build a brand new track, like they're doing with the high speed rail out in California.
Just quick aside, I figured he was talking about the hyperloop, but there's a different high speed rail. In twenty fifteen, workers in Fresno California broke round on an electric California high speed rail that'll cost maybe one hundred billion dollars, but it may be done in twenty thirty. Train expectations are so low in LA that we're just like, that's fine, We're fine riding motorized razor scooters in traffic while y'all
work it out. PA fox Hall wants to know, why is there such a huge variation in train track sizes and whips all over the world. Why isn't there more standardization? Essentially, Yeah, that's a great question. That was a problem here in
the United States. In fact, it's one of the major factors that cited for the reason that the South loss of the Civil War is that they had a missmash different track sizes, some of them five feet wide, some of them six feet wide, some of them the standard four feet eight and a half inches, or in the North they tended all to be the same gauge, so you could move a car from one railroad line to another without having to stop and unload everything and reload it.
No. Around the world, You're right, there are different standards, and often it's just based on local preference. I mean here in the us, we have four feet eight and a half inches because a lot of what we learned we learned from Great Britain, where they use four feet eight and a half inches for their gauge, and it seems to be on the whole sort of the ideal. Anything wider than that gets to be kind of difficult
to cumbersome. Anything more narrow than that you can't carry as much freight, So you know, for whatever reason, that's that's what we've gone with.
Is that a more round number in metric, or four feet eight and a half inches.
Is very specific, it is, and it's really not anymore round in metric.
I never knew that about the Civil War. That's amazing. Also, four feet eight point five inches rounds two and also nonsensical one hundred and forty three point five to one centimeters. So okay, he says.
The story I've heard is that that was the width of and I think it's just a myth, But the width of the wheels on Roman chariots, we're about four feet eight and a half inches and nets like the width that accommodates two horses. Who knows.
Okay, I was curious is this accurate? And how wide
are horse butts. So I did a little investigating and I found a paper titled Morphometric Measurements and Animal Performance Indices in a study of forms of Brazilian support horses undergoing training for a venting, and according to their statistics, point five to five meters was the average width of a horse butt, which converts to one point eight feet, so times two horses is three point six feet with fourteen point five inches a little over a foot between the horse butts for tail swishing.
I suppose, for whatever reason though, that's the number that we settled on. You know, one number is as good as any frankly, as long as every track is the same number.
So wow, I wonder if there's a they have special yard sticks when they're putting that together, Like, how do they make sure they do.
We've got out on our road. We've got gage rods, which are just metal pieces that are measured to exactly four feet eight and a half inches, and that's i should say, measured from the inside surface of the rail, not from the center of the rail or something. So we can put that out there and check every so often to make sure that our track is in perfect gauge. It's obviously a problem if the gauge gets a little wide.
You know that the wheels are wide and compensated, but if it gets two wide, you've got a car on the ground, and that can be a big problem.
Oh yeah, that's a pretty big, heavy problem. What are the railroad ties made out of?
For the most part, they're made out of wood treated wood treated with creosote, usually to prevent rotting or where to make them last a little longer. And the kind of wood they use varies and be oak, it might be pined, just whatever might be available locally. They have in some cases moved toward concrete ties, particularly with higher speed roads, just because those last a little longer and they're less prone to kind of stretching and shrinking in the heat.
There's something about creosote that smells so good. I don't know why.
It's a classic railroad smell. Yeah, the coal smoke and the creosote.
Oh for sure. Did anyone make a country song about that cole smoking KOREASO?
If they haven't, they should so.
Side note, there are some good sad country songs about trains I found out, like Willie Nelson's City of New Orleans about the flagging power of the rail system in America, But in terms of wheepcore, perhaps nothing could beat the George strait Diddy called trains make me lonesome, And the.
Next thing that we knew, some old train came passing through.
Han Daddy got home.
And we ain't seen him. Noder, Trains make me long lonesome.
I got so so sad for George straight and that I just started reading about his history. But George, what the hell? According to Wikipedia, when George was in the fourth grade, his father and mother were divorced, his mother moved away, George and his brother were raised by their father. Dude, George, you just threw your dad under the bus or the
train so hard with that song. Now, in the name of single dads everywhere, I hope at some point George bought his daddy a three point seven million dollar train car. Is just an apology, all right? Onward? Also, this next question is from your favorite Mars expert from the Areology episode. Okay, Jennifer Booz wants to know why do the trains go too fast sometimes and derail? Is there not a good way to limit the speed on certain parts of the track.
Yeah, so this is an issue now, that we've been dealing with the last ten years or so in the US the adoption of positive train control, and one of the advantages railroads have over any other kind of transportation, frankly, is that they are on a fixed guideway. They're on rails, so theoretically there should be some automatic way to stop them without worrying about them swerving and crashing off the
side of the road. And what we're trying to do now is pass legislation that will put in automatic control units in a locomotive cab so that if the signal the equivalent of a stoplight on a highway is read and the engineer, for whatever reason, disregards that signal and does not stop, the locomotive will automatically lose power, slow down, and stop. But we're facing some of the same problems that they did when they tried to make all the
tracks the same gauge. You know, every railroad uses a different system, and to try and get everything to work universally is taking a lot of money in a lot of time, more so than we might have anticipated. But it would make us safer, I think, and prevent some of the accidents we've seen in recent years.
Right, it must. I mean when you see the news and it's like there was a trained derailment that was possibly influenced by texting, you're like, oh my god, that was not a problem in the eighteen hundreds.
Yeah, no, it's Yeah. It's frightening enough when you hear about people driving and texting, but when you're in a railroad situation is just it's a warrant because you know that the engineer is a professional. You trust the crew to deliver people safely, and if somebody on the crew is texting, it's just it is a dereliction of duty. And those kinds of distractions The railroads police very very thoroughly,
and I mean that's a fireable offense. If you're caught doing that, there's no second chance.
Oh sure, yeah, I imagine you can't even like eat a sandwich when you're operating a train.
Yeah, when you're there that you've got the one job to do and that's what you better be doing.
Right, like smoothies only no hummus and chip dip too involved. Okay. Lindsay Loeper wants to know why were villains and old movies always trying people to railroad tracks? Was this something people were actually afraid of. That's a great question, you know. I frankly, I'm not aware of any specific incident in history where someone was tied to a railroad track by
a villain. It may have happened, but you know, I think it's become kind of a Hollywood trope, and it probably comes back to the early silent movies when that was done. But railroads were seen as dangerous as they are dangerous if you're trespassing her in the wrong place.
Meanwhile, a short distance away, Whiplash was up to his favorite past time, tying women to railroad tracks.
Wait wait, wait wait, Okay, So, according to the Straight Dope, these incidents have happened, but the victims tended to be men, and they occurred after this crime was popularized in fiction in dozens of plays, the first of which was an eighteen sixty three British production called The Engineer. Now, a bunch of historians think this was a way for us to comprehend our own fears just about the power of industry.
So getting tied to the tracks with a train barreling at you is kind of like an old timey black mirror, but like a CPA toned looking glass if you will.
It seems like, I think, a good way. And it builds up the drama too in the movie, because you see the train in the distance, you see it coming, you see the heroin or whomever it might be, struggling to get out. So I guess it's a great trope, but yeah, one that's been around a long time.
Never trust a curly mustache exactly. That's your first clue. This guy's got some rope and a curly mustache. You're gonna end up on a train track.
Look out for snidely whiplash.
Julie Noble wants to know, how is it the people who live near tracks don't hear the trains anymore? Do you think that people get so used to it that it just becomes like part of breathing for them?
If I may quote one of my favorite movies, The Blues Brothers, that's seen where they go to Elwood's apartment and he's by the l there in Chicago, Jake says, how often does the train go by? Elwood says, so often you won't notice. I think there's some truth to that. I myself, I live on near the airport, so you know, we have airplanes flying over fairly constantly. At a certain point, you just tune them out, you know, they become background noise. We can get used to a lot of different things.
It's the same for people who live along the railroad tracks, and you kind of get used to it and the sound just eventually fades away and disappears and buried in your subconscious.
Now. For more on this, look up neural adaptation or sensory adaptation. The first Google results use living close to train tracks as an actual example. Right, I live it on Busy Street, and I'm sure there are so many more ambulances than I realized. But yeah, Julie Noble says, I live a block and a half from a track, and we'll be on the phone, windows closed, and the other person will say, oh my god, is that a train? And I seriously don't notice that? All right, Carrie's true.
I wants to know why do commuter trains like Chicago's Metro have to rent track time from the rail road lines. So I guess there's freight interference during rush hour. That's kind of what you were talking about.
Yeah, yeah, there's been a big shift, you know, the railroads as soon as they started losing money on passenger business, which really goes back to the twenties, if not before, But railroads got out of the passenger business, especially after the highway system in the late nineteen fifties through the sixties. Amtrak came on the scene in nineteen seventy one. And yes, Amtrak basically is a tenant or a guest on the
freight railroad. Now, theoretically the freight railroad just supposed to give referential treatment to Amtrak, but in the real world it doesn't always work out that way.
I had no idea that that was like a shared situe. They have like a time share on the tracks. Essentially, am I the only one who thought that Amtrak has been around for like a century? Okay, John Worster, I love this question, says, back in the day, railroads seem to have become the authority for setting the correct time and history.
How did that happen? Yes, and that's one of the railroad's legacies that's with us today, standard time and time zones in the United States. You know, prior to that, every town kind of decided noon was whenever the sun was the highest point over city hall, the church, whatever it might be so you know, that's fine if you live in a world that's only you know, maybe fifteen twenty mile radius, but not so good when you're on railroads where time, especially in those days before they had
electronic signaling, you know, the timetable was absolute. If a train had to go by at one ten PM, then it better be there at that time because other trains are counting on it so they can pass it safely and whatnot. So railroads very early standardized time, you know when nationwide and what eighteen eighty three, I think somewhere thereabouts. And with that, now railroads could coordinate their schedules more efficiently and then more safely.
Frankly, yeah, no one wants to be on a platform being like, is it noon or two?
I don't know.
My horse got thirsty, so it's got to me eleven. You're like, what Sunday? November eighteenth, eighteen eighty three, all of the US railroads synchronized their clocks, and then way later in nineteen eighteen, standard time became an official law, but it wasn't until two thousand and five, with the advent of texting, when I'm on my way became standard language to mean I haven't yet left the house, so just order without me. Do you get as jazzed about subways as you do about locomotives.
I do. I'm I'm particularly fond of the Washington Metro system, and they opened up the new Silver Line, you know, not quite all the way to Dallas, but I made a point. My wife and I traveled out there. We simply rode there to the end of the line and back, so I could say I've done that mileage. So I have ridden every mile of that subway system. I haven't done every other one. But some people do that. They just travel around the world traveling different subway systems. It's a good time for them.
Now do you look out the window the whole time or do you just like read a book and kick back.
I like to look out the window. I like, you know, you can't really do that when you're underground, but I love it when you're above ground because again, you get a different view on things, and especially fun there when you're running through the media and of I sixty six to kind of laugh at all the traffic that's stuck there going nowhere. Haha. I'm going by at thirty five miles an hour. Have a good time sucker.
So it's a showden Fried thing. Yeah, a pharaohequnology showden Freud sure rolls off the tongue. Brook Bosone asked this question, which I also like to ask. Do you have a favorite movie that takes place on a train?
Oh, that's a great question. I have a few favorites. Actually I could talk about. One is maybe the greatest train movie and one of the greatest movies of all time, and that's Buster Keaton in The General nineteen twenty six, one of the highlights of silent cinema, and he did some incredible stunts in that movie that Osha would not allow anybody to try today, but absolutely worth watching.
Was there any trainspotting in trainspoting?
Yeah? I think the trainspotting they were doing was a different sort than actual train spoting. There were tracks involved, but they were not railroad tracks. We'll leave it at that.
Oh God, I never really got that fun.
I like the Great Locomotive Chase with Fess Parker. It was a Walt Disney movie made nineteen fifty six, great Civil War adventure story but actually based on the same story as The General, but it's more kind of By the facts for the Great Locomotive Chase. I also love the first Gene Wilder Richard Pryor joint movie, Silver Streak from nineteen seventy six, which is like kind of a
Hitchcocking story. Speaking of Hitchcock, north By Northwest has a great railroad scene in it too, on the twentieth century limited, So lots of great train movies out there.
Oh, did you see the Murderer on the Orient Express recently?
I did, yes, strictly to see the trains. I'm not particularly Nagatha Christie fan, but you know, gotta go see some trains in the movie. So not enough of them anymore.
You're not a Johnny Depp fan. He looked busted in that.
I gotta say that he did.
I would feel bad saying this, but I don't. Elizabeth Bassett wants to know how did train stack up in terms of efficiency and cost against semi trucks.
Yeah, there's really no more efficient method of overland travel than the railroad, and you can't beat that. Downside, of course, is when it comes to delivering that freight, you've got to take things off the tree and loaded onto a semi truck for that last mile, so to speak, whereas with a semi truck you just leave it on the
truck and take it right to the door. There's been a lot of intermodal transportation now in the last few decades where items will come safe from Asia and they'll travel by ship in these large forty foot containers, and then that container gets moved by a giant crane onto a flat car. It can move by rail to some point in the middle of the country, and then that container gets moved off the flat car put onto a
semi trailer and then can be delivered. So you're not unpacking the objects, you're just moving the actual trailer, for lack of a better term, the container.
Yeah, it's kind of like a lego goes from this thing to that thing to that thing.
Yeah.
Yeah, very much like that.
Yeah, which is pretty cool. It's like, oh, that's a good idea.
Yeah, yeah, it's pretty pretty slick.
And then when you're done, you can take the shipping container and make a coffee shop in Brooklyn out of it.
There you can or yeah, a small house or something or someone.
So I looked, and you can buy a four hundred square foot house made out of a shipping container on Amazon. It'll cost you thirty six thousand dollars and the reviews are very bad. Said it was over. Then I found one for fifteen grand on Etsy. But really, these shipping containers are like two thousand dollars used if you just want to pinterest it up and put a little elbow
grease into some DIY living in a metal box. Also, this next question is what when I was a journalist at the La Times, I learned was called And I'm just gonna blete this because this is one of the very few non sweary episodes, because I work with the Henry Ford on a children's show. But this question is
the whole question. It's the great question you save for the end of the interview, just in case it ficks up your rapport to all and they tell you to go to So Dan Goding asked the awkward and wonderful question, what was Henry Ford's role in trains in America? And is that over weird for you to be working at the Henry Ford when Ford was much more of an automotive proponent proponent than perhaps the locomotive.
Yeah, Henry Ford is nothing if not a study in contrast. So this is another example. I think he would have counted himself a faroequinologist. He used to talk about when he grew up here in Dearborn, running down to the Michigan Central Track and waving at the engineer as he went by. A lot of the locomotives we have in our collection he personally collected. He built that replica Civil War era coach for the dedication of this museum because he thought he had to have a proper train here
for the ceremony. He actually owned a railroad for a few years. He bought the Detroit, Toledo and Ironton, which is a local line here that runs from the Detroit area down to the Ohio River. He invested something like fifteen million dollars improving that railroad. He had all the engineers wear spotless white uniforms, maybe not the best color choice in retrospect.
That's like wearing a white jumpsuit on Day twenty seven, dude, if you know what I mean.
He had them polish up the locomotives with shiny brass so they looked their absolute best. So you know, he actually loved railroads, And you know, I don't think he set out to build the model T with the intentive killing railroads. He was probably surprised, like many other people had, how quickly the automobile caught on and how effectively it wiped out other competing transportation meta But you know, he traveled by a private railcar. He enjoyed trains right up through the end of his life.
So there you go, the King of cars, Doug trains. What's the coolest train.
In the World's that's a great question, the one that's operating in front of you right now, I would say, and I think a lot of faraohecronologists would agree with that.
Whatever you see rumbleby is the coolest exactly right, yep. Is there any flim flam about trains you'd like to debunk? Any myths that you're like, come.
On, people, Well that's the one that we already talked about about. What is a train versus a locomotive? I think is a pretty big one. So I'm glad we got that taken.
Care of, right, And last two questions always what's the suckiest thing about your job? What's the hardest or most annoying thing about your job that you're like.
Uh, well, you know, I have a lot of people who will walk up to me and say, wow, you must have a dream job, And I have to say it's enjoyable. This is not to cut on it, but you know, it's not as though I walk through the museum with a box of popcorn every day looking at the exhibits. I mean, it has its bad days too, And one of the challenges I think is the frustration and not being able to get to definitive answers to
some things. You know, when a lot of these early pieces, not just the locomotives, but everything we have in the museum was collected in the late twenties early thirties, record keeping was not what we might have today, so you know, there are certain answers that will never be able to find here. So that can be frustrating. And you know, it can be difficult to try and tell all the stories that you want to tell because you just don't
have the time to go into the detail. There's always some other pressing activity you have to take care of. So yeah, those are frustrations, but on the whole, it's a lot of fun.
So a lack of omniscience, we'll just shock it up to not knowing everything in the known universe and space and time.
Yeah, if I could know that, this job would be pie.
You know. And what's your favorite thing about trains or your job?
Well, yeah, this is well my fav I can answer about my My favorite thing about trains is I get to work with them in my job. My favorite thing about job is the trains. But now my favorite part of the job. What I really love here is that, you know, there are few jobs out there where you can get instant gratification. You know, when I'm up there in the office banging away at the computer, buried in books,
I get kind of frustrated. I can walk out into the museum here and I can see people actually enjoying the work that we do, and you know, hopefully learning something while they're here too. So that's really rewarding. And I think the best part about the job and the best part about trains. You know, I mentioned the size, but I no one will ever beat the magic of a steam locomotive. You know, they are in a sense
living creatures. You know, they hiss, they roar, they make noises, smells and sounds that you just don't find anywhere else. And we haven't used steam locomotives in any big capacity in this country for more than sixty years now, and yet people still know what they sound like, they still love them, and they still I think for a lot of people, are the first thing that comes into your head when you think train.
Oh yeah, that who like absolutely lowing smoke? Yeah, of course? And where can people find you or do you have anything any train resources?
Two point to yeah, they can find me right here at the Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan. They can come out and see some of our stationary locomotives in the museum, or they can ride behind a live steam locomotive through Greenfield Village on our.
This has been amazing. Thank you so much for doing this.
I learned so much my pleasure.
So the next time you see a train, feel free to audibly say woo for so many reasons. And also please no selfies near trains. And they're not paying me to make this episode, but to see some of their historical artifacts, including trains. Check out the Henry Ford on Instagram. Innovation Nation is shot there and it's on CBS Saturday mornings, or you can find episodes online. I'm in every episode in case you want to have some Aliyward. Content that
doesn't usually involve the F word. Ologies is at ologies on Instagram and Twitter and I'm Ali Ward with one L. There are more links up at aliward dot com slash ologies. There is merch at ologiesmerch dot com. Thank you Shannon Fultis and Bonny Dutch for being merch queens. A link to the campology September fifteenth event in Portland, it's just in the show notes. And thank you to Aaron Talbert and Hannah Lippo for being wonderful admins in the Facebook
Ologies podcast group. I said last week that it's the only reason I really go on Facebook anymore, but I'd like to issue a correction and say this week photos of my brainiac and wonderful cousin Brooke Rennick getting married were a highlight. They were definitely a reason to scroll.
Congratulations to you and Lauren. Congratulations to Stephen Ray Morris for being just cool as hell, and to Nick Thorburn for being very good at writing and performing theme songs such as ours, which is titled Ali at the Museum. If you stick around through their credits, you know I tell you secret and this one I feel like I'm gonna hear a lot of feedback on this one. But I'm gonna tell you I've never seen any of the Harry Potter movies ever, not even one minute of them,
and I have never admitted that to anyone. And I feel like I should see them, and I want to, but I feel like I should watch them all in one night. And it depends on the mood or the occasion. Do I have snacks? Like should I do? I?
Should?
I never and see them. I read a little bit of one of the books and I got so hungry because they just kept talking about like triacle puddings and stuff, and I was like, God, damn it, I just need a snack. And so I've never watched the movies. But tell me how if I should watch the Harry Potter movies, And if so, how thank you? Okay, you're the best forbye. Hacadermatology, hombiology or doo zoology, lithology, Yeah, technology, meteorology, mattology, ethnology, zeriology, ethnology.
It's a lot of fun.