TechStuff Episode 700: How Subways Work

was it confetti or money that you wanted? I didn't read the end of the email. You know, it looks like you actually got this confetti from the Department of Treasury, because it does look like you've got shredded I assume you got it from there because you can get shredded money from them. Yeah. I'm gonna hope that that's in fact where this is from. But it it's very festive.

I appreciate it. Hey, thank you. You know, because we live in an urban environment, we have all kinds of cool stuff in our city, Like we do have a federal ment here, right, Yeah, yeah, we have a lot of cool things in Atlanta. In fact, we could do a full episode just on the neat stuff in Atlanta, And now that I'm saying that, I'm kind of regretting

that I didn't think about it beforehand. But the thing we decided to go with it was several people have requested over the years of tech stuff that we cover how subways work. Uh not the sandwich shop, not subway. Thank you for correcting me before we went on air. Yeah, there was an incident beforehand, but we won't speak of it, and instead we're going to talk about subway systems like

subway trains because it's a fascinating topic. The technology is very married from really super simple stuff in the early early days of subways too pretty sophisticated systems to today and today. Um. Now, to understand subways, we have to understand what was the need for a subway. What is

the story of how subways became a necessity? And it all starts back in the mid nineteenth century when we start seeing this incredible move people moving from pastoral areas to urban areas to cities as the opportunities for jobs and to make money increased in cities and decreased out in farmland areas. So industrial revolution is a big part

of this, right yeah, absolutely. And one of the one of the strange things is that for a lot of the people moving into these urban areas and for the people who were, you know, the functioning government of these urban area is nobody was quite sure how to city. Really, these were built on these medieval medieval if I'm pronouncing correctly,

I butchered at both times. But they're they're built on these much older plans, narrow lanes, you know, the ditch going through the center of the road, and they were not equipped to handle all these pedestrians, let alone the carts. You you and I were calling this the bs era for before subways, but we we have to paint a picture for this. And and you have some um specific statistics too about uh, the just the sheer growth. Right. So imagine, if you will. You've got this urban environment

that that Ben was describing. You've got these narrow roads, You've got the ditch that's in the middle. You've got traffic that's pedestrian and horse traffic, cart traffic, wagons, that kind of stuff all going in these cities. We're gonna focus largely on London here because London, as it turns out, is the first city to incorporate a subterranean training system.

Uh so London in the in eight hundred, London was already the world's largest city at that time, and it had one million people fifty years later, So just five decades later it went from one million to two point five million people. That's explosive growth in a relatively short amount of time. Yeah, it's an extra London and a half. Yeah, and imagine if you will what this does with population density, with traffic. I mean, you had, uh issues with housing.

It was it was hard to get good housing in London. Not not that that's you know, that's totally different. Now if you are incredibly wealthy, it's not hard, I guess, to get good housing in London, but otherwise it can be a bit of a challenge. So one of the things that governments wanted to do was in aspire people to still live further outside of the city where they could have a much better living condition and then be able to come into the city to work and then

leave the city to go back home to commute. Right So that way they wouldn't be forced to live in tiny conditions or in slums. Yeah, exactly, they wanted to you know, that's no way for a person to live. And now we understand that all the jobs are here, so we don't want to deny them the access to the jobs. And we need people to do yeah, but we don't need them to be living in human conditions. Right. And also that's that's dangerous for the city overall, when

you go to crime, when you go to sanitation. Uh. But it's it's no secret and I don't think this is an offensive thing to say, nor spoiler. It's no secret that parts of London were pretty rough. So these people who had, you know, had jobs, not necessarily um, very high dollar jobs. Right. The equivalent middle class would be would ride steam railways, right, coal power rail Yeah, so the coal was there to generate the heat that

would convert water to steam. The steam would actually power the train, but you're using coal as the main fuel to to start the steam in the first place. It's not like steam just happens on its own. You gotta heat it up first, heat water up first. So there were railways that existed in England and they had stations that terminated on the outskirts what were then the outskirts of London. But city city officials had passed laws that that restricted those railways from going any further into the

city because there just wasn't room. There wasn't room for a train to come in further into London than on the outskirts. So your big stations at the time were Paddington, it was a Houston was another one, and King's Cross. Those were the three big ones. So you could have people ride in to those points from further out in the countryside, but once they got there, they still had to make their way further into London to work wherever

they were working, which meant that traffic was still nightmarish. Yeah, and this is pedestrian traffic, so much of it, which to me is even more undesirable than being stuck in a car uh or on a horse I guess I've never been in a horse jam, but but just being in this constant crowd because more than seven hundred thousand people every day rode the train to the edge of the city and then somehow got to work right. Yeah, which makes my own commuting stories, like the war stories

I used to tell, seem pretty fail in comparison. You have some pretty good wines, though, I do. I mean I used to have to. I had a commute that was three hours a day for a while, that was you know, total commute from but the commute in and the commune it was three hours total. That was it's a significant chunk of your day just spent getting to and from your your your job. But there were other forms of mass trendsit before the subway and beyond the

train systems. There were omnibuses. Now, the original omnibusses were not motor vehicles. They were horse drawn wagons essentially. Some of them, like you could some of them were like double decker type things like the old double decker buses, except a cart drawn by horse. If you ever see any of the old footage, like there are old films that show some of the traffic in cities like London that when when there's still were quite a few horses, Like there were some cars by that time, but there

were still a lot of horse traffic. To see the omnibusses being pulled, it looks terrifying to me, like these things looked like they would flip over. I get sneezed wrong, and people are just packed in them like they're they're sitting shoulder to shoulder, and I'm just thinking, boy, the poor horses too. I mean, it's gotta be tough. And there were those also created even more traffic. I mean, it's not like it's not like that solved a lot of problems. Plus where do you put them when you're

not using them? You've gotta have a place to park these things right, right, they're not they're not small. You can't really parallel park in omnibus and it's got to be a pain even with just a single horse, especially if you have crime. No cars of course came in everybody who has to pay the various uh traffic usage taxes in London currently uh probably probably as a couple of regrets about their cars. Cars. Cars, Honestly, even though they came after subways and of course after horses, they

had their own set of similar problems. Most importantly, where do I put it? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, if you are if you are living in a city that's built on a medieval city plan, at least parts of the city are that way, there probably aren't that many places where you could put a car, right, you know, And then it's it's kind of like New York City to there there are parking areas in New York City. They're like parking garages and parking decks and that sort of thing.

But street parking is one of those things that people just guard jealously. Oh yeah, the whole story about you circle a block sixty times waiting for a spot to open up so that way you don't have to walk an extra fift or whatever. And there there's still people who who just uh, stay in a parking space and wait until the cleaners come, the street cleaners, and just move it for the street cleaners and then park back

because it's that valuable. It's it's crazy and one of one of the things when these cars didn't um really solve them many problems, Like the railways can only do so much. The horses weren't helping, although I'm sure they you know, we're doing their best. It's because all of these forms of transit had one thing in common. They were all competing for the same space. They wanted to go above ground, right there was no no other means

of getting around. They didn't have elevated pathways, so you couldn't go above the traffic, so that really limited what you could do. You know, any solution you had just been adding more fuel to the fire right. Uh, and so here's some other challenges. Let's say that you've got a great design for your city. Let's say that you

you have planned this out from the beginning. There's certain cities that had the benefit of early civil engineering planning from the start, Like Salt Lake City is a great example. It's laid out in a grid that's very easy to understand. It's very easy for you to navigate. Um. There are other cities that are laid out in a way that defies logic. Atlanta, Georgia, just throwing it out there, we

don't really have blocks in Atlanta, Georgia. We've got blobs, you know, surrounded by one way streets that only direct you into some sort of nether region where Cathulu rains or something. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have.

I've been there as well. Right, So in this case, you know, how do you if it's been planned out really well, you may not be able to make any alterations, Like you might be able to make the streets wider to allow for a street car, for example, And even if you did have a street car, that's still on the surface, it's still competing for that same space here

in Atlanta. We can tell you we just had not not too long ago, a street car prototype program rolled out, literally rolled out, and we've already had multiple incidents of accidents right rolled out. I'm sorry, no, no, no, no, it's my show on car stuff. Right. The the the street car is kind of a proof of concept and we're and what you're saying is absolutely true. We're seeing, uh, a spate of accidents or incidents maybe and luckily there

haven't been any serious injuries or anything. But it's because an entire city of drivers, uh that's normal only in that part of town, when they're in a hurry to ur from somewhere, is trying to navigate around this thing that moves at its own pace, right, and they're not familiar with it, and uh, you know, it's it's one of those things. It's growing pains. It's one of those things. And there there are other arguments about the street car we won't go into because they're very hyperlocal and if

you're not in Atlanta, you're not gonna care. Yeah, it's gonna be weird. But there there's another solution to right, not just the street Yeah, there's also the elevated solution the elevated trains like the L in Chicago. Um, have you ever written the L? I have? I have? I love the L. I thought it was amazing. So just quick sidebars. So my girlfriend took me to Chicago for my birthday and I'm a big old chief skate and I didn't want to. Yeah, I don't want to. I

don't want to do anything. So I just told crab apple until you know. We got on the plane and hit me, we're really going. And it was so exciting to just get on this train because the views are great. You can go pretty much anywhere. Uh And and as a transit rider in Atlanta, that's not the case right at the Atlanta Transit's very very limited. Now. The system we have in Atlanta has a series of trains that some some sections of the track are above ground, some

are below ground. Right, Yeah, so ours is kind of a hybrid surface and subway system and the and the But the elevated thing, as as great as it can be, it's not gonna work for every city. Right You you still have to build supports for that elevated system. Right, you have to be able to secure the bridge that the tracks are onto something whether it's pylons or two buildings or whatever, and that solution works in some situations but not in others. So you've pretty much exhausted all

your other opportunities. The only thing left to you is to go down below street level so that you're no longer competing for that landscape and you can just get people to and from locations underground. Thus they're not impacting traffic at all. You can actually help alleviate traffic by encouraging a lot of people to go underground as opposed to cluttering up the streets. So sounds well, it sounds like it's a logical solution, but then it also sounds

like it's an incredibly difficult one to do. Oh yeah, for numerous reasons. I mean the cost alone, not just not just the cost of the actual materials and labor to create this, but the cost to the city from lost business activity. There's actually also human cost. I mean, there are there are incidents where during the the excavation of various tunnels, Uh do there might be an accident?

You know? I think for the New York City subway system, there were several incidents of people who lost their lives and tragic accidents. It's one of those deals where this is a giant undertaking, it is filled with risk, particularly whenever you are digging new or a body of water. I mean, obviously in London it would have been the Thames River as well as the Fleet River. Um, those were both big concerns. In fact, there's an interesting thing

about the Fleet River. I'll talk about that when we get a little further in where they had a clever way of getting around that spoilers. Yet I think people will enjoy that when du The cool thing though, is that, to paraphrase this quote I'm stealing from somebody. Uh, necessity is the mother of subways. So now we're going to turn our focus specifically on London. Londinium as a as as the character from the I T. Crowd would call it again, the largest city in the world in the

mid nineteenth century, and they had these restrictions. They couldn't allow the railroads to go any further into the city, and they had to figure out how were they going to alleviate this massive amount of traffic and this influx

of people that we're living in increasingly poor conditions. Uh So this was when I say people by the way, I should point out that I'm really talking about the middle class, and and the stories that you'll hear are grim in many ways because people in the lower classes were really not cared for or thought about or taking care of. They were essentially the victims of progress in

this case, which is a tragic and common tale. Right whenever you get to this thing where we're making improvements to the city, it benefits a certain part of the population, and other parts of the population are essentially forced out, and that's a tragic part. It is, however, something that I wanted to acknowledge because I think those people obviously should not be forgotten or a gloss over. Now, to be fair, a lot of them were also the criminal

element of London. Well sure, yeah, you know that's there are a thousand ways to analyze that, but it is a fact, and it could be you could argue, and I think convincingly argue that they were largely the criminal element because their conditions meant that they could not get work in a legal sense, so they were kind of their hand was forced. You know, you still have to make a living somehow, you have to. You have to survive.

So we could go down on a long rabbit hole a Dickensie and rabbit hole and talk about this, but we'll we'll just leave it at that. So you get a guy named Charles Pearson, our hero of the story. Yes, he's a London solicitor that means lawyer to you and me. Uh, And he argued that London should allow essentially located train station to allow people to commute into the city without

clogging it up. So he was His first idea was, let's extend the railways that already terminate at the a perimeter of London then perimeter of London and allow them to come further end. And the city said, no, we can't do that. There's just not space. It's not feasible. Stop asking. We can't even a horse in this thing, right right you you're barking up the wrong tree. So that's when he said, well, what if instead of that

we end up looking at a subterranean train system. And he goes around and talks to some rich friends of his, and his rich friends ce Pearson as someone who has a pretty radical but potentially lucrative idea, because seven thousand people community every day, if you can charge those people even a small amount to take a subterranean train station system so they can get to their jobs. You have revenue just pouring in, so the investors say, you know, this risk is worth it. We're going to put our

money together. So here's one thing that I thought was really cool that I did not realize before we started researching that the underground the tube in London started out as a private enterprise. It was not a government funded thing. And especially when you think of England, we think of a lot of government funded programs, much more socialist style economy. Um, it's not pure socialism, obviously, they're only their elements that are very socialist. And you would think, oh, well, the

subway system must have been one of us. No, it was a private enterprise, and in fact it would become a competitive private enterprise. So uh, the decision to go ahead was made, and so how would they move forward? Well, they started looking at what the various techniques would be to actually create this underground system. Because all right, they've decided they're gonna build these tunnels. They clearly didn't have

the magic tunneling machine like. It wasn't like the League of Extraordinary Gentleman where some jewels verned hie device comes up with a nose cone as threads on it, and it just drills down and lays down track behind it. That's not how it worked. So let's talk about the technique they use to build a tunnel. Okay, well all right, yeah,

let's do it. This is crazy. Put your put your mind back in the in the body in the context of someone in eighteen sixty and and picture you're hanging out with the rest of your mover and shaker friends. You know, some aristocrats there and they're talking about putting people in the ground in a moving vehicle. This is bizarre. So they started out in they started out kind of creating a new level of surface. Um, because they dug a big trench and you know, like maybe twenty ft

across in an existing road. Then they would lay two tracks side by side and they would cover that over with brick. So it's kind of like they were raising the surface a little bit. And they only put This wasn't perfect. They called it cut and cover. Um it was. It was a massive paint. We're a family show, so it's a massive paint. And the key star for all this construction. Um, Like, were you ever around during the

big dig days? Did you ever go to Boston? Oh, I I went to Boston when they were not during the Big dig it was after that, but it was I was in Boston when there were still some fallout from Big dig It. It's crazy to stop a city like that. And uh so, um there there's some interesting statistics here about just how much of a problem all of this construction. Sorry, because they didn't start with just

like one tunnel. They did a network of them. Uh and they and they said, what we're going to do is build something that connects these rail stations like king Cross, King's Cross excuse me, to a more central location called Farrington. Yes, Barrington was the first underground station to station on the London Underground and so it connected to these other various rail stations. So this was like the centralized point and

people would have to pay a ticket. They first they had to pay a ticket to ride whatever rail line they were on. They had to pay an extra ticket to get on the underground to get into London. But if that's your your options so that you can get to work without spending six hours behind the horses butt, you're gonna you're gonna pay that money if you can. But yeah, I mean, because come on, time is money.

So this cut and cover method meant that whenever they were installing the rail lines, that entire street was off limits. You could not go down that street as at least not in a in any kind of vehicle. You might be able to walk along the very sides of it, but it meant that it was incredibly disruptive to businesses to homes. Whenever the tunnel was being built along that particular stretch of the street, and they would build up this this this framework around the trench they had made.

That's where they would break it up so that it would become an enclosed tunnel. And it actually reminds me a little bit of the way disney World was built. Because at disney World, uh, they wanted to make an underground system. They call it the Utilo doors the utility corridors. But the problem with the Disney World is that it's in Florida. And by that I mean in Florida, your water table is really close to the service of the ground.

You can't dig very deep before you hit water. So instead of digging down, what they did was they built the Utilo doors. Then they dumped ground on top of the utilodors and effectively built the ground up. So it's kind of like that. It's not quite as extenct as as extreme as that, because they did dig trenches. But in general these trains were just a you meters below the service of the street. The very early ones were um. And you were saying that it was a massive pain

in the key star. That's putting it lightly. More than twelve thousand people were displaced from their homes during the construction of the Farrington station. Those were twelve thousand people who were in that low low class in London. So some people, like the middle class largely considered a positive thing because they thought about cleaning out London a little gentrification. Yeah, they emptied out the slums, right, they got rid of

the undesirable. Clearly, if you were one of those said undesirables, it was not such a pleasant experience. No, no, it wasn't a pleasant experience. And and furthermore, Jonathan, even if you're on in the middle class people who says, you know what, I am done walking with the schmucks and the norms. I'm going to ride the train. Then I'm gonna pay extra for the underground. Even if you could

afford to do that. You would find that this was not an ideal situation because the same kind of thing that they put above the ground is the same, the same uh, same steam and smoke burping, uh metal monstrosities they put above grounds are the same ones they put underground. Yeah, they were using steam powered trains. This is before they were moving to electric trains. We'll we'll get to that later.

So again, you're using coal coal fire to heat up a boiler so that it generates steam, which is what's giving you the ability to create the power needed to move a train. Right. So some of the some of the steam engine designs they had had steam capturing systems, so it wasn't blowing tons of steam into these underground tunnels, but you still had coal smoke. Yeah, so did you see any pictures of the earliest underground trains. They they had uncovered trains like it was a wagon essentially being

pulled by a steam engine. So you're getting if you're worried about not hitting your daily coal smoke in take just hop on the train because it would hit you. Yeah. They actually got to a point where customers were complaining about the smell of sulfur and smoke and all the steam, to the point where the company that had created this underground line did a pr blitz where they talked about the beneficial elements of steam and smoke inhalation. I'm not

making that. They're like, it's good for you, except I'm saying, to the British accent, it's jolly well good for you. Yeah, So breathe deeply, enjoy the smooth smell of coal smoke. Of course that's not, you know, sustainable, and that's not the case today. So so they continued making some improvements, right yeah, and the big ones would be at the

end of the nineteenth century. So in so, while London was recovering from the terrible antics of Jack the Ripper, the subway system was starting to really come into its own. There are two really big things that started to happen at this point. One was that they started to dig

deeper tunnels because they were creating this network of train systems. Now, keep in mind that first rail system that was put in was from one company, but other private companies saw how successful that was and decided they were going to connect other points of London to one another, and they just started to dig their own tunnels. So you had

competing companies making subway lines. Now they weren't linking together necessarily, and and the points where they would share a station, like you would get this uneasy partnership where they'd be like, all right, we'll build a station where your line can stop there and our line can stop there. But if you're a passenger and you need to switch from one line to the other, you have to buy a new ticket because one line is operated by one company and

the other lines operated by another company. So if you're on the Piccadilly line and you need to get on I wish I knew in the name of another line, then you would have to pay extra to switch to transfer because they're operated by two different entities. That was that was unfortunate. Yeah, But the reason it was so possible was because they were able to dig these deeper tunnels. And the reason for that actually dates back to the early eighteen hundreds, but was an idea that had not

been been implemented for the subways. It was to use a tunneling shield, which was an invention from a guy named Mark is Ambard Brunel, French expatriot. Actually, um, yeah, he he had come up with this idea, and his idea was pretty simple. He's all right, let's let's create a cast iron circular or at least a like a a thing that would have kind of like an arched top shield. All right, So it's it's made off cast iron.

It's very sturdy, and you put that at the the the rock face or the earth face of your tunnel, and it has compartments in it that people can be inside and they can dig from that point, so it's almost like it's a portal, but instead of it leading anywhere, there's just earth there. So you get your your miners there with hand tools. We're talking shovels, pick axes, that

kind of stuff. Um digging away the ground and they dig as far as they can uh to kind of clear out the space immediately in front of the shield. When there's enough space moved out of the way, enough earth moved out the way, they could use jack's to jack the shield forward into the tunnel until it's pressing up against the earth again, and then they would continue. Now, the purpose of this was to provide stability in the earth as they went lower down, because they're actually digging underground.

Now they're no longer, digging a trench and then covering the trench, digging down and the horizontal exactly. So they dig a shaft first and then install this shield and start digging their horizontal tunnel. And they needed to make sure that the tunnel was going to remain sturdy and stable and not collapse in on the minors. So when they would move forward, there'd be another team that would lay bricks to create stability in the in the area

that had just been excavated. So it's a very painstaking process. Dig dig, dig, remove the spoil as much as possible, push forward the shield, laid down the bricks in the now new tunnel, and keep on going until you're finished, which sounds crazy now. Runelle had come up with this while trying to create a tunnel that went across the

underneath the Thames. Now the Thames divides London. You've got a northern section of London in a southern section of London, and the Thames runs through, so he wanted to create a tom hold that would allow horse traffic to go underneath the Thams. So this wasn't meant originally as a subway. It was meant as a tunnel for for just regular horse drawn carriages and carts and that kind of thing. But what would happen is it would take decades from the finish this. By the way, there were a lot

of problems. There were political issues where funding was ran out and then they couldn't get funding for a long time. There was a change of politicians, and then he was able to get funding again and complete it um and

finished it sometime in the eighteen forties. It started in the eighteen twenties, it finished in the eighteen forties, and in eighteen sixty five, uh one of the one of the underground companies, one of the company's running trains, purchased the tunnel and repurposed it for trains running underneath the Thames, which very very intelligent move. But they started to actually use this very technique to make new subway tunnels like

subway tunnels on purpose as opposed to converting it. And we we should also say that at this point in our story, the public is not as adverse to the Underground as they were originally. You you can see some pretty self assured, uh selfissured people. I mean, history is full of people who say, like, well, if the good Lord intended us to fly, he would have given us yes,

or at least some copter device attached directly ours. Right, So people were saying that Pearson and then um that that later Brunell were essentially kind of quacks for saying get put people underground and h Now when we see his new tunnels being dug, and we see all this intrigue coming and going but not permanently stopping this progress,

we also see the public u becoming at least diverse. Right, And once they were able to demonstrate that this was an effective means of getting around London, people took to it quickly. So before I go on into the further improvements, let's take another quick break. Let's let's take a look at what it must have been like the day that the original underground station Farrington opens and how that turned out.

So it opened on January nine, eighteen sixty three. For context, in the United States, that's when the Civil War is raging here in the States. So civil wars raging here in the States. Meanwhile, in London, the first subterranean train

station opens. So uh, that first train had those uncovered carriages I was talking about, pulled by a steam engine powered by coal so not necessarily the most comfortable way, but it was incredibly efficient and it was a huge success, and manned required the company to increase capacity very quickly, Like it wasn't long before they had to have enough trains so that one would be arriving every ten minutes, right, because this quickly went from being fanciful too indispensable and um,

and I I love that you're pointing out the larger historical context there with the Civil War, because there's a tendency we have sometimes when we look at history to see each event as occurring in its own isolated timeline, like like it like it's all completely here and nothing else in the world is going on at that time, right. Yeah. So one of the things that I thought was interesting was that on the first day they actually had to shut the station down at one point because there were

too many people who wanted to ride the train. Yeah, it was just a was too crowded. So again, they

needed to get this capacity up to deal with the demand. Um. But that also meant that you had more smoke and steam filling up these tunnels because you had more trains running through, And that really wrote brought to to people's attention that this was not ideal, and they had talked about possibly using other methods to move trains through the system, including a cable system where the train would actually be attached to a cable that would be winched and it

would pull the train through the system, or pneumatic systems or hydraulic systems. But it turned out steam was the cheap way, and the cheap way one and the non experimental way as well. To remember that, Yeah, it was a proven methodology for getting people around. And one last story I wanted to mention about the opening day. One of my favorite bits was that the company invited the Prime Minister of England, Henry John Temple, the Vicount Palmerston's.

So we call him Palmerston because that's the way the Brits do, you know, name them by their title. Um. He was seventy nine at the time and he was invited to ride on the first carriage and his reply was that he declined because he said he quote wished to remain above ground a little longer end quote. See I totally get that. That's that's first off, that's way more polite than it needs to be British. It's incredible, very dry like he's years old. I wish to remain

above ground just a little longer. And and for the record, I'm sure everybody knows this, but we say that as a huge compliment because we love dry humor. Oh yeah, no, I'm not criticizing. I adore it. So the time we get to the nineties, when they're digging these deep holes, that's when they hit the other big advance. So the deep holes were great because it meant that they could

actually lay out a lot more track. Obviously, if you layout track using the cut and cover method, you can't really have a crossing track that way, right, so you have to dig underneath in order to do that. The deep holes, the deep lines allowed that to happen. The other big development that really improved things was the use of electrical system so you could use electrical trains. Huge difference because now you don't need the smoke, you don't have the steam, um and it was an enormous improvement

in the experience of taking the underground the tube. Yeah, it was also many times more complicated. Yeah yeah, it meant that you had to have a third and fourth rail. Actually, with the London one, they had a direct current approach. All subways, as far as I am aware, All subways that are electrical anyway run on direct current, which has its own issues that we'll talk about in a second. But they had a third rail in the fourth rail.

One was essentially the positive rail. One was the negative rail, and that's what provided the electricity to the electric cars so that they could move through without the need for steam. Um. Very important development. And we still have the continuation of all these private companies operating these lines. Yeah. Yeah, by the way, funny trivia, I'm guessing here, but that's probably the etymology of the third rail as a figure of speech, right, yeah, exactly, Yeah,

it comes from this era. So and then electric trains in general, because some ways are one version, but there are other electric train systems obviously. And then and then, you know, as you were saying, there's this hodgepodge of this motley crew, if you will, of different private companies that are teaming up or they're not teaming up. And historically when we see stuff like that, what it leads to will be a great first phase of competition inovation.

So then you get this incredible outburst of growth throughout the city. But the as anybody who has ever tried to find the right charger for a cell phone knows. Uh. The standards can be different, and eventually that creates enormous problem. Well, especially if you wanted to Let's say that you have a complicated commute and you need to change trains twice.

Let's say that would that might mean that you have to pay three times once to get on the first train, then you change, had to pay again, and you change, you had to pay again, and that was not a good experience for consumers and people are starting to complain about it, and that led to Parliament creating the London Transport,

which was created in nineteen three. So the purpose of the London Transport was to bring all these companies together and itself was a public corporation financed by private companies that unified the system. So if you bought a ticket on one system, it was good for your trip all the way through. UH. You know, a lot of subway systems are essentially built on that same principle, although many

of them have kind of a metered approach. UH. In in London, they have different zones and if you're traveling from one zone to another zone, there may be an extra amount that you have to pay in order to use the subway system. So the the logic there is the further you travel, the more your ticket is going to cost, which is not unusual. There are other places like Atlanta where it doesn't matter how far you're going,

you your your ticket is is one specific cost. But it also really doesn't matter because it doesn't go that many places. Yeah, I like to think of it as a working progress man. One thing that they one thing that they found as well. Okay, first, I don't want to discount that innovation because I know it's not of tech thing, but it is more. It is more than

just the bureaucracy. It may sound like this really made made the whole thing a m not an organism, but you know, it made it one thing instead of you know, eighteen and that meant that they were able to address some bigger problems collectively as a unit. Because one of the big questions that a lot of you guys are probably waiting for us to talk about will be what do you find in the ground. I dig a tunnel

deeper and deeper and deeper. Yeah, so one thing water you could find water awkwifers could be a problem where you have to figure out, well, how do we deal with this, and usually you would have to bring in pumps, pump water out until you had gotten a dry system, and then you create your tunnel and you seal it up as fast as you can so that water can't

get in. That was a big one also. Well, the same things that caused issues for traffic were also issues for things like getting water around your city, like supplying water to people, or sewer lines to take waste away,

or electrical conduits to get power to people. As time went on and many places would bury these, but that means that you have to worry about that when you're digging your tunnel, and depending on how old the system is, there may not even be records of where these things are now, so you had to be really careful when you were digging, and you might encounter something that wasn't on your plans, like there's a sewer pipe here, I don't know if it's still in use. That could be

a bad thing. It's also another good example. So with the case of conduits, sewer lines, water lines, uh either you would end up having to excavate around them. That was often the most the most logical approach was to try and just alter the plan a little bit so that you would avoid them, or you could actually incorporate them into the design. So some of these had uh they would suspend pipes or sewer you know, sewer pipes or water pipes or electrical conduits or whatever from the

ceiling of the tunnel. They would be built in so that you would have supports from the ceiling holding these in place. Because keep in mind, originally they were buried in the ground, they were completely supported by the ground below them. So in this case they just replaced the ground below them with whatever supports they have and suspended from the ceiling. Uh. So there were a couple of different options there, and one of the other ones one

of the other things I thought was really cool. Remember I mentioned about the Fleet River and that was going to yeah, yeah, so Farrington itself was built on the river bed of the Fleet River. That was that was where they decided to place this. It made the most sense logistically, but then you have the question of what the heck do you do with the river? Well, what they did was they made pipes, They let the river

flow into the pipes. They buried the pipes below the ground of where the riverbed was, so now the Fleet River flowed below the its original riverbed, which is where

Farrington Station was. This, however, caused issues occasionally. Yeah, whatever would rain really hard, the river would overflow and the station would start to flood, which in the day is of the electric trains, meant that sometimes you had shorts, so sensors would start shorting out, and sensors shorting out would mean that the whole system would have red lights go up, which it tells the drivers they can't go any further because there was no longer a reliable means

of making sure that the track was clear ahead of you, so it would require people to actually go out and physically check the tracks to try and find the shorts. And I watched uh a documentary before we came in here. It was it was the Tube and Underground History of London, and it was this hour long documentary, really well done. And it starts off with this supervisor of the Farrington station. And as soon as he gets in, he's, you know,

he's showing the crew around, he's explaining things. He gets a call that says there has been this this problem of sensors no longer working and they're all these red lights, so you've got to be kidding me. And it goes down into the into the tunnels, and he says, oh, this is the worst shift of mine bloody life. He's walking around checking for these these sensors. And then he

got back up and explained what I just explained. That it was on the bed of the old Fleet River, and then the river itself was flowing underneath the station and occasionally it would come up on the station level because of too much train. That's right for the world's first subway system. This London buried the river alive. You think about it, I mean, you know, you gotta do what you gotta do. And the river really was just it was Look, you got a nice rover here, U

shape someone buried? Uh. So before we before we get into uh into too much trouble for our for our river jokes, which you and I both have several more. Yes, we are dancing around river jokes, river joke dancing. I'm not going to take the bay man, but but we we we should talk about um the modern era today, right right? So your your trains are running on electric systems for the most part, New York system uses six

volts of direct current to power trains. London uses six thirty volts of direct current UH and has both the third and fourth rail. New York's as just the third rail UM, So they're carrying high current but relatively low voltage. High voltage would be considered over one volts. So the reason why they're it's it's relatively low voltage is to minimize the risk of electrocution. Electrocution, of course, means death through when you encounter an electrical current with enough voltage

to kill you. Electrocution like you wouldn't say I got electrocuted if you got shocked. Electrocuted means you are no longer alive. Is always fatal, Yes, it is by definition, So they wanted to make sure that this was safe. So they're using direct current, they're using relatively low voltages. That meant they had to use high current to push the power to the trains and make it an effective means for the trains to receive the power they needed

to operate. It also meant that sins using direct current, you had to have lots of different substations throughout the system to provide that electricity. Because direct current, the effectiveness of direct current decreases as the distance increases between you and wherever the electricity is being generated. This was the problem Edison ran into when he was advocating for direct

current to be the standard in the United States. Westinghouses argument was, if we go a direct current, Uh, the effectiveness of direct current decreases the further the further way you placed the load from the point of generation, the less effective direct current is. I mean that we would have to build power stations every couple of miles, which, as you pointed out when we were talking earlier, Edison

wasn't necessarily adverse to. Yeah, he had no problem with that, And as you pointed out, Westinghouse, however, it was not convinced that lining Edison's pockets with substations was the best right. So Westinghouse's argument was to use alternating current, which allows you to create transformers where you can step up or step down the voltage relatively easily, just using a couple of different coils of wire. Uh. That was not that's not an option with the trains. They wanted to go

with direct current. Um. So that's why you have to have these electric substations throughout your system, so that the power is is uh distributed properly so the trains keep moving. So yes, speaking of the trains, what's going on with them the lake? How have you ever looked inside the the Marta train and seeing the person driving, or looked at the controls that they operate. I would love to do that one day, but apparently you have to train qualified.

I've never been in the cabin while they've operated it. But you know, there are some Marta trains where they have the sections at the front of the train car. You might not be You're not You're not in the front of the train. You're somewhere in the middle or towards the pack or whatever. But you give me right there where you might be on another train car that's a driving car. It's just not being used as a

driving car. Point. And then you can look in at the controls all you like and no one freaks out because there's no one in there. But the controls are really basic, right. There's there's essentially a throttle control, which tells the motor how hard to work and thus how fast the train will go. And then there's a break and there are a couple of other controls for things like the doors there's a radio system generally speaking, so that if passengers have an emergency or need to communicate

to the driver for some reason, they can do so. Uh. And these trains have a specific name in the industry. They're called rolling stock. Weird. That makes me think of cattle the same here, and sometimes I feel like it and I'm on com on one of these trains. But yeah, that's that's their general name, is rolling stock. Uh. Some of them are entirely computerized, so you don't even have drivers on those trains. They're all automated. It makes me

think of the the plane train at Hartsfield internationally. You know they they there's no driver on that, it's a computerized it's just the thing that kind of goes around the airport. Yeah, whereas we're talking about these, there would be for the entire system. So New York City subways are being upgraded over time, and they would be fully computerized once the upgrade is done, and you wouldn't have

subway train drivers. It would all be computerized. And there's there's still like a human being in a supervisory position. It's sure. Yeah, you have to have people who are overseeing the system itself, so you think of a like a control sense, like like like mission control for space. For a space mission, you have people who are overseeing the track systems, monitoring them, making sure that you're still

getting a signal on all the tracks. You know. That's one nice thing about using electric tracks is that if there's a break in that connection, you're gonna know about it, because you're going to suddenly have a section of track where there's no electricity generator. You're gonna see that there's no longer a complete circuit. Uh Their sensors placed along the tracks to make sure you know the position and the motion of any given train on any given part

of the system. They're usually surveillance cameras that allow you to get a look at that. Uh So, these are all very important elements of any subway system, whether it's computerized or whether it's still operating mainly under manual control.

You want to have this kind of command center where you can see what's going on and make sure that if maybe there's a signal that's not functioning properly and it's telling drivers that they cannot go forward, if you are the administrator and you see that the train needs to move forward, so that passengers can get off the train safely, and then they can then send out the maintenance crew. They you know, the administrators can actually see ahead and say, all right, your path is clear, or

may be you need to switch. We're gonna switch you to this other track so that you can pull in safely, and then we'll shut everything down and fix it. I've been on a train where that has happened, and it's not the fastest uh experience. Right, It's not always the most smooth process, but it is one of those things that these these operations have to keep take into consideration. Uh. Some of the other modern trains have regenderative regenerative breaking,

so they can regenerate some electrical power. They can store that in batteries for whenever they're having to apply breaks. Um, and you usually you have, uh. The only other thing you have to worry about are the various if if you're talking about manually driven trains, are those lights I was talking, Ah, yes, yeah, and this is look, I'm

gonna be honest with you. Yeah, And this is one of those things that I like to say would be a dream job, but I think it's just because I I want to do it for an app after New Yeah, so if anybody listening to this show, well, yeah, it's kind of like kind of being an engineer on a train or a conductor on it. Like I said that, I mean there is this I think lots of people have this desire, like it's just kind of a cool

sort of experience to do once. I imagine there is some skill to it because you have to know exactly where to pull up in a station. Um, some stations, like like in Martha, we have different lengths of train depending upon the routes they're going on. So some of them are express trains and they're shorter, uh, and they make a much shorter run along the line than the full length trains. So you have to know where to pull up in a short train compared to a long train,

because it makes a big difference. You don't want you don't want everyone having to run all the way down the platform in order to get on your train. I think maybe sometimes, But Okay, So the reason I'm bringing this up is because it sound is like this might this might be our last chance, man, this might be our last chance to be human human subway drivers, what what's the future of the subway? So computerization is definitely

a big one. And then there are some other proposed methods of getting people around in trains through tunnel systems that owe a lot to subways but operate on a very different level, and the big one being the hyper loop, which tech Stuff did a full episode about the hyper loop if you're curious what the hyper loop is. It was a proposal that Elon Musk or Elon Musk made um where he said, think about a tunnel system where trains can travel through the system. It's uh, the air

has been largely pumped out. It's not a true vacuum, but it's close to vacuum so that you have minimal air resistance, and you could make these incredibly rapid train trips between San Francisco and law So Angeles and a fraction of the amount of time it would normally take you to get between those. That could be a future of train systems too, although granted that works really better for long distance travel, not sure city travel. So I

do think computerization is the way it's gonna go. And we have some fun, little cool facts about subways in general that we just thought, you know, it didn't really fit. And the rest of the episode. Um. One of those is that you may have heard about abandoned subway lines and abandoned subway stations, and those are totally a thing. They're real, And I know it sounds like some X Files episode or spy thriller, but human civilization it turns

out as depressingly good at losing things, including subways. In London, for example, when population density has changed and commuting patterns changed, some stations became irrelevant or obsolete, and so they would stop servicing those stations, and sometimes there would be entire lines that would be obsolete, so tunnels would be unused. And there are still stations underneath the streets of London that look more or less the way they did when

they closed. They haven't haven't changed significantly. I mean, for one thing, getting down into the subway is incredibly dangerous and not easy to do very much. Yeah, so it's not like this is the kind of place where squatters are going to, you know, find their way down there. But there are some subway stations and subway lines that exist, but there are in no way used anymore. And that's

kind of interesting. It's not just London that's a good example, just the oldest, but the um there are other ones in other subway systems as well. Another is that subway systems have to have massive ventilation systems, even after the steam coal era. They need them because you're underground and while you might have stations that are open to the air, uh, that's not enough to circulate air through the whole system.

And if you're in an underground station waiting with a bunch of other commuters, you're all breathing in and out, You're all breathing out carbon dioxide that starts to accumulate. You don't have any circulation. Things could get uncomfortable and deadly fairly quickly. Actually doesn't take that long, depending on where you are, especially in some places like the Moscow subway system, which is has famously deep stations like that

is out and out dangerous. Yeah. Yeah. And and even if you're thinking, well, I'm not going to be in the station that long, just think we're talking about a continuous flow of people coming down there breathing out carbon dioxide. Because it's not just when you're there, it's all the people who came before you, it's all the people who are coming after you. It's going to eventually get to the point where it's so stuffy. It's not it's not breathable.

So there are all these ventilation systems built into subway systems. There are ventilation shafts. They are giant air essentially climate controlled style systems to recirculate air, to pull fresh air from the surface down into the tunnels to make it safe. The New York City one has a system that is capable of moving six hundred thousand cubic feet of fresh air every single minute. That's pretty cool. Yeah, that's that's pretty necessary. I mean, I've been to the New York subway.

More fresh air the better, in my opinion. And there's there's also so there's this continual operation that is sort of behind the curtain. For the average subway user, you will probably not ever see the massive amount of work that makes it possible for people to go underground and then come back out alive. Ventilation is one of those, but that's not the only one. No. The other one being that you're on a train. The trains running on rails, you have to make sure those rails are lined up properly.

I mean, these are these rails, aren't It's not like it's one solid rail that goes the entire length of the of the train line right, it's in segments, and segments means that over time the ground might shift the train. Just the wear and tear of trains going on, it could make things shift where a lot of lines can get out of alignment, like two rails might get out of alignment with one another, and that could lead to very dangerous conditions like a train derailing if it's not

if the tracks aren't aligned properly. So in order to make sure the tracks are lined up, a lot of subway systems use UH geometry trains, which sounds like it's my least favorite subject in school being forced upon me in a mass Transit mean it, but it's not. No geometry trades. Geometry trains are specifically designed to check the alignment of rails, and they have UH equipment aboard, including a computer system that can analyze data and a collection system.

It usually involves infrared like UH infrared laser type system to check for alignment. It can check how out of true a rail is and if it goes outside a certain threshold, it created you know it logs it says, at this point, this rail is no longer aligned within the safety zone and it may very well be that it's still all right to use at that moment, but

it's getting dangerously close to not being okay. So then it logs that sends in a maintenance request and the maintenance crew will have to go out to that point

and adjust the tracks so that they were in alignment. Again. Uh, it's very useful system to have that um and it's one of those things that is necessary over And one other cool fact it's not in our our notes, but it was one that we talked about briefly before we came in here, is that subway systems have been used to keep people safe during wartime and related type events,

like in in the Blitz when London was being bombed. Often, uh, citizens of London would end up retreating into the underground because there was enough of protection there to keep them safe during the bombings. Yeah. So if you were lucky enough to live near a subway station, if there's some sort of blitz, which I hope never happens to anyone, but if there's some sort of situation like that, then that is one of the best bets for you to go.

As long as the ventilation is working. Yeah, I often think of like when I've been I've been in downtown Atlanta a couple of times when um tornadoes have moved through, that's my go to, like I want to get underground. Now you know, we actually had tornadoes moved through Atlanta several years ago. Now, yeah, they went straight through downtown like it was like it was like nadoes were looking for dragon Con. It was all the dragon Con locations

got hit. They might have been cause players, it could have been it could have been people, it could have been people saying. And my here's my theory. People from the future coming back in time to attend dragon Con makes sense cause playing as Sharknado not realizing they overshot their travel and went back to before Sharknado people. Yeah, time travel is like just the scheduling is tricky, and they didn't stick around to apologize or explain because they

were so embarrassed that they had overshot. When they needed to come back, they're like, oh, that's Sharknado is not even out. Our costumes don't make sense. Let's go. Let's go. Yeah, I mean, work hard on a costume. It's so easy to feel dumb. It all makes sense to me. Now, well, I am going to possibly cosplay as piercing. That would be good. You could go around and try and convince people to give you lots of money to go underground, and I just need to start digging, right, Jonathan, That's

pretty much it. Yeah, just get a shovel, a shovel and a song on your heart and you're good to go. So this was a lot of fun to look into. I mean, this was one of those things where I know it became a large largely a history lesson, but to know sort of the massive undertaking it requires to build something like a subway system, it really lets you appreciate that technology is more than a story about how an object works when you flip a switch, what is happening?

The story of technology goes well beyond circuits or motors or engines. It goes into the story of the people around it. Who were the people responsible for bringing that technology to life. What sort of hoops did they have to jump through in order for it to become a reality. Was it something that was adopted early on or was it something that that ended up being dormant for years before people said this is a brilliant idea. Those to me are the really amazing stories that I get to

tell on this podcast. And Ben, I am so thankful you could join me for this poet. The pleasure is absolutely all my and Jonathan. And that was a really uh that was very well said, and I think it's I think it's so appropriate for such a milestone episode as well. I'm kind of inspired now I want I want to go out and invent a train system. I would like to at least, you know, leave some sort of positive impact before I shuffle off this mortal coil. Uh. And if this podcast happens to be it that, I'm

cool with that. Not not this particular episode. I'm not ready to go right now. I mean this podcast in general. You want to Stay above Ground a little bit longer? Yeah, yeah, me and me and the Prime Minister of England. We want to Stay above Ground was a little bit longer. Uh. So this was a lot of fun And of course you can all find Ben's work all over How Stuff Works. Car Stuff is the podcast you do with Scott Benjamin, Yeah, who's also appeared on this show and uh got a

show called stuff They don't want you to know. Now. You and I are thick as thieves. We hang out on brain stuff, and we hang out on what the stuff, and then sometimes we just uh, we just make interesting things. But I do want to do something that I've done most times when I get a guest spot here on your show, and that is to plug your other show forward thinking to anybody, for anybody who hasn't checked it out.

If you like, if you like tech stuff, if you like talking about especially the stories around technology and possibilities, then do check that show out on YouTube and iTunes. Yeah. Yeah, that's ah. That shows a lot of fun to do. Uh. The the video series is phenomenal. Uh. I get to work with some of the most talented people, the producers, the editors, the writers, because I want to Yeah, it can't be really funny. They wanted to They wanted to see the future through my eyes, and you can't do

that without being a little corny and goofy Uh. It's largely serious, but I do get to have fun with it, and um, very fun to do. And then of course the audio podcast has Laurens vogelbamb and Joe McCormick in it, both of whom have been obviously guest podcasters, and Lauren's my former co host, So if you miss that interaction, you should go check that out. It's fantastic. This has been great, guys. I am so happy to have reached episode seven hundred. I can't wait to get episode four hundred.

I'm even gonna skip anything special for one thousand. That's not true. I don't know. I don't know what I'll do for one thousand. That's in like three years. So let's have a parade. How parades work, Jonathan. Everyone always asks me to do how how stuff works works or how tech stuff works. But I've done those. You need to look at episodes five hundred and six hundred. But it is a lot of fun to do these kind of special episodes. And of course I'm always interested to

hear what our listeners have to say. If you guys have any requests for specific episodes, maybe there's someone you want me to interview, Maybe there's a particular guest host you really want to have back on for a particular topic. Let me send me a message. The email addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com. Drop me a line on Twitter, Facebook or Tumbler. The handle it all three is text stuff h s W, and we'll talk to you again. Releases for more on this and bathands

of other topics. Does it have stuff works dot com