This exciting HEP-isode is our HEAVIEST yet, as we put the spotlight John Deere's groundbreaking 3812 80T pulled scraper pan, venture back to 1956 and Mack Trucks' Arctic expedition, and explore colossal machines like Ohio's famous Big Muskie. All this and a spectral locomotive blasting across grandma's farm on HEP-isode 27!
This exciting HEP-isode is our HEAVIEST yet, as we put the spotlight John Deere's groundbreaking 3812 80T pulled scraper pan, venture back to 1956 and Mack Trucks' Arctic expedition, and explore colossal machines like Ohio's famous Big Muskie. All this and a spectral locomotive blasting across grandma's farm on HEP-isode 27!
now, I didn't say that checking her core temperature would be a one-man job, but that's okay because there's two of us here. Welcome back to the next exciting episode of the heavy equipment podcast and, uh, if we're not canceled yet, we soon will be. This is joe boris here, as ever, with mike hot, mike switzer and um, how's that going over there?
Speaker 2:we'll be checking the court temperature, all right, of that scraper tractor pulling that scraper, if you you know. Let me tell you something. We're just going to jump right into this because we skipped over oh, we already just did because, because biff henderson yells at us all the time because we're not heavy enough for him. But let me tell you, john deere has created a creation. Is that a thing they did?
Speaker 1:that's how, that's what you do.
Speaker 2:That's what, how creations come to be if you want to remove a fairway and relocate it into a giant heap of what used to be. That's what you use this for. You move dirt with it, it scrapes. You pull it with a tractor that they make as well. The whole thing is made by them, and then I heard that a company out in Western Ohio just picked up three of the first ones that come off the assembly line. They move just about more dirt than anybody. They've been doing this for a long time. They have tandem scrapers they were doing the tri scraper for a while where you have the single with the dual behind it, the dual track, quad track, four-wheel drive. This new rendition of it, though, is, uh, thoroughly going to make people more productive, move more material and just, ultimately, be fun to run.
Speaker 1:I think I don't know I mean, they look like a ton of fun dude right. So we're talking about the 3812, the 80t pulled scraper pan. There's a bunch of these, but, as you said, they are updated and like I can't even imagine what you would use this for. This is like, if you remember the old transformers movie, where the one robot, like the one planet, turns into a big robot. This is what you would use to shave that thing.
Speaker 2:Well, here's the mystical work of a scraper. Okay, All right. It goes out there and it shaves the planet off a little bit at a time, literally from the planet right, and you're relocating the planet at an enormous rate, but you do it so slyly and so exactly that you don't really think it's doing anything, until you come back later in the day to check on the progress of the job and you go who the hell moved all that? And John Deere did it for you. That's what they're doing with it.
Speaker 1:There you go. Well, this is going to be a good show. I know we've definitely been talking about going heavier and heavier and heavier as the time goes on, especially with Biff constantly pushing and complaining. All you guys talk about is electric. Nobody wants to talk about electric. Well, right now, we've already talked about some pretty heavy stuff with that.
Speaker 2:38 12 hold on hold on before this podcast, and we wanted to talk about biff either, but yet somehow he gets mentioned more than any of our headlines, so all right that's what you get when you're in the room.
Speaker 1:We got to get him to like get on the mic, though, but he's he's shy, poor baby he's shy baby.
Speaker 2:You know he speaks broken english, so we're not really sure speaks ukrainian, pretty good, is that where he's from? I don't know he must have picked it up somewhere.
Speaker 2:He must have picked it up during that month that we forgot him at the Flying J Well you know, when Biff came to us in the cab that he took us to the studio in, I think that we realized right then and there that there was something to be said for his quality of. You know, it wasn't of speech, but it was the fact that he definitely could help us. The quality of his company is definitely worth having. So, you know, wasn't of speech, but it was the fact that he definitely could help us.
Speaker 1:The quality of his company is definitely worth having. So you know it's funny. I didn't mean to bring into this, but I was thinking about this as we were uh debating the the inclusion of young biff here. Do you know about the 1956 Mack truck Arctic expedition?
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:There is a story more Say more.
Speaker 1:So one of the things that we're going to talk about that's actually on the script for today is this world's largest Mack truck that is getting restored, and this is something that we're going to go into some detail about in a little bit. But as I was researching this, I realized there's not just one of these things. Mack actually built a couple of them. There was 11 of these trucks. Each one of them has a 28 liter V12 Cummins diesel engine and what they were originally meant to do they hauled three million pounds of cement and steel into the Arctic Circle to build, like Cold War era 1950s B-52 bomber bases up there. Wait. So they built two or three of these 11, 1956 Bulldog Convoy 11 giant multi-axle Mack trucks that are just absolutely bananas.
Speaker 1:And there's one being restored out of a lot.
Speaker 2:There's one being restored right now With the rest left up there.
Speaker 1:Who would leave? That I have no idea. I couldn't even tell you.
Speaker 2:See, here's the thing about mac trucks and and this is something if you go back through, if you go back through history and you're looking at mac truck history very carefully and quietly they built tank engines. They built the mac v8 tank engines. They built expedition vehicles to above the arctic circle that they have all these things. They had a three axle off-road mining truck rigid frame. That they did. They had all these like massive moving trucks that were just constantly engineered and reworked and built from scratch, mind you, in allentown, pennsylvania, and shipped to wherever they needed to be.
Speaker 2:Kenworth did the same thing, peterbilt a little bit, but in all seriousness, mac just quietly kept producing all this stuff. Yeah, and a lot of people don't realize too that in allentown, if you go through the museum, I mean they were some of the first to take on noise back in the 70s, oh yeah, and they had noise rooms where they were testing trucks and this is all ahead of their time. So this whole thing about this expedition above the Arctic Circle truck, it's just another thing that they get into.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and they did quite a bit in terms of experimentation. I just want to read out some specs of this thing and you know, especially as we decided, that we're going to do as heavy as we possibly could today. So let's get into that. The bot without the body, so that just the chassis itself without the body, is 95 485 pounds. According to the original literature from mac, the gvwr is 331 875 pounds, which means it has a payload capacity on its own exceeding 100 tons, and these are imperial that's just the truck.
Speaker 2:That's just the truck that's not whatever it's not whatever the it is towing, that's just the truck.
Speaker 1:Yeah, powered by a v12. Yeah, detroit diesel V12.
Speaker 3:Each cylinder in the V is 149 cubic inches.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, 1900 RPM red line. Could you imagine that thing, dude?
Speaker 2:I can't imagine starting that up there.
Speaker 1:The air coming out of the exhaust hitting you in the chest.
Speaker 2:if you're standing next to the tailpipe would blow you over If you needed to shut it off suddenly and you put a phone book from New York City and the intake it would all back out the exhaust.
Speaker 1:That's how serious of a vehicle this is. This is like Jonah and the whale. Yeah, it sucks in a goose and shoots out like a perfectly cooked turkey.
Speaker 2:Like one of them old hannah barbara cartoons that truck is so nasty mean you could pour boiling water down the intake and it would pass ice cubes out the exhaust.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's how wicked that thing is this thing is so sick it defies all logic or man-made nonsense that's absolutely true, so imagine if something like that was roaming around today and you get in your uh tesla and you're riding up the highway and then you hear this enormous rumble and your car suddenly thinks that it's being engulfed by an aircraft carrier and freaks out and pulls itself over to the right and all it was was that coming up behind you and putting its turn signal on saying please let me buy let me buy.
Speaker 1:You say yes, sir, and let it go. I was like, oh, I didn't realize the tesla could talk to the other vehicles, that is, we talked about this.
Speaker 2:We did. I got cut off by one and I'm not going down that rant right now, because we're talking about heavy, heavy equipment so listen, though, this is probably the heaviest gbwr for an on-road vehicle I've heard of.
Speaker 1:The closest thing I know about other than that is a husky port terminal tractor that is technically road legal, has a 35 mile an hour top speed, and that thing has 180 000 pound gvwr. So this is like double that, and those are insane. Those are the things that you put, like you know, multiple containers on and they drag them to the rail yard. So, uh, yeah, man, this is, this is heavy iron. This is, uh, just about as heavy as it gets. Uh, however or comma it does get even heavier, because I don't know if you saw this video they have attached the largest construction claw in north america to the largest crane. It's a thousand ton capacity floating crane and they're using it up there in new england they're clearing up debris from the francis scott key bridge collapse out there in baltimore and, uh, this is crazy, it's a huge collaborative project up there oh, I mean it has to be.
Speaker 1:It's just absolutely insane how much steel and wreckage and concrete actually went into the water. We don't want to make light of that because it was obviously a tragedy. But if you are a fan of heavy equipment and you're a fan of go there and look at it that's it, they're down to the bank.
Speaker 2:You can. You can walk up and you can go down there and park and walk up and go see the equipment that they're using to clean this up. That's it.
Speaker 1:The core of engineers is using 22 floating cranes all in, but this one is by far the biggest. It can go down 260 feet to clamp onto debris and the jaws that have four hydraulic individual Hydraulic individual clamps can open 29 feet. This is like the jaws of life. If you were like a GI Joe figure, yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know. That needs some people to go down. We actually my brother needs to go down there and report from the scene.
Speaker 3:I think that's what we need to do. We need to put him on.
Speaker 2:We need to put him on a van and get him down there and have him report, and we can cut it.
Speaker 1:This is Neil Switzer reporting on the scene. I don't know. I think this thing's big, but is it really that big? That'd be the whole report.
Speaker 2:I don't want to see why I came out here. Yeah, because nothing phases him. You're absolutely right, he could be nothing, phases he could be in a. He could be in a hurricane while they're trying to uproot some part of a foundation of a building and he would be like we're here on site okay nothing that's it. He gets back. It gets back and walks sideways down the road because the hurricane's trying to blow him over.
Speaker 1:Do you remember those videos that come out? I want to say 2009, 2010, when the meteor exploded over russia and it was like this blinding light. And there's this dude driving, he's got an in-car camera and the meteor comes down and he just flips his sun visor down like I had no idea what was happening. The world is ending. There's like a nuclear flash in the sky and he's just like floop, like that's it.
Speaker 2:That's the end of the reaction that's your bri was an ex-MIG fighter pilot because he has seen it all and he literally just went.
Speaker 1:I'm ready. I am uninterested. He didn't even slow down, just Sun Visor. We have to find that video and play it. Too bad, this is an audio show. That'd be a perfect one for the YouTube.
Speaker 2:Oh my God, the claw though the thing is with those grapples and stuff like that and the demolition equipment. I mean the tonnage that they're about to remove from the water, cut up and load is enormous from that bridge.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like 50,000, 60,000 tons of steel, and it's not including it doesn't look like that, but when you realize that the size of what took it out was massive, then you look at it and go wow, I took for granted how that bridge was sized yeah, but you know we had that thing when that um, what was it called the evergreen that was stuck sideways in the suez canal there were, they had they had those little excavators and they're digging it free, right, they weren't that little, that thing was massive.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a 30 ton excavator and it looks like a little gnat.
Speaker 2:Looks like somebody's trying to dig it out with a tonka truck there was memes where people had spoons on the end of the stick, you know, and stuff like that, and they were like scoop it out, yeah it's like no, I made some of those, I think actually I think somebody actually did the research. It had like a seven yard bucket on it, so think about that seven yards of material and it looked like it was doing nothing yeah, that's insane I wonder if they lost any in that dig.
Speaker 2:That was my other question. I wonder if they. I wonder if they lost any in that dig. That was my other question. I wonder if they. I wonder if they lost any other ones where they were like julio dropped it again, bring another one in get another one?
Speaker 1:yeah, I don't know, man. There's some really crazy stuff out there in terms of bigness and we've talked about a couple of things like these lee pair excavators. We've talked about some of these big mining trucks that they have in the, you know, these open air mines and these quarries and things, but like there's 300 plus tons, just enormous.
Speaker 2:And then I mean the, the autonomy on top of that is is just another level of our country and our and our whole world is headed towards that. But I can't even believe that amount of tonnage being moved on, just calculations at the end of the day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's it. And uh, yeah, I don't know I think we've said about all we're going to say on that, other than like it's way bigger than you think it is, and if you're up there anywhere near Baltimoretimore, anywhere near dc, go check that out. It is an incredible mobilization of really, truly. So I don't want to get too philosophical here, but it's an incredible mobilization. God damn it. Don't show me no table. I'm trying to run a podcast here. So what I was about to say, what is that? It was an incredible mobilization of human ingenuity and intelligence, and my faithful co-host just shot me a Facebook marketplace listing for a cadaver table. So Three of them three of them.
Speaker 2:My equipment broker just sent me a picture of this going. I think this fits your model. I don't know what that message means, but that means.
Speaker 1:But I assume we're just going to go after the show and check that out.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, we're going to wheel those into the Costco and fill them up like cards.
Speaker 1:What's the whole joke about the necrophiliacs? On the way home from work, it's like, hey, let's stop by and crack open a few cold ones. It's so bad, that's so bad. That won't make the edit, I promise no. That's going to be the 30-second tagline that we put on social media.
Speaker 2:I mean, have you ever seen the cab, the inside of the cab of one of these giant shovels? Right, they're massive, and you sit in this big seat, like on the Enterprise, and it's all glass around you, your nacho cheese warmer's behind you and there's a whole buffet table and everything back there and all that stuff because you're there all day. Right, yeah, you live there. Yeah, you live there. There's pizza ovens and everything else. It's incredible the amount of you know room that you have in these. But when you look at it from the outside, because of the mass of what this thing is on, it looks small yeah, for sure, but you know, we know it's not I mean look well, yeah, I mean look at, uh, the the shovel there, ohio.
Speaker 2:I mean it had its own indoor overhead crane in the engine room on the shovel. What, yes, yes, look up the engine room of the Big Muskie. And then Peabody Coal. Peabody Coal had the world's largest shovel for a while there. Songs were written about that, about Peabody's Coal Train. It's hauled it all away.
Speaker 3:Daddy, won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County Down by the Green River where Pyrrha died today? I'm sorry, my son, but you're too late in asking Mr. Asking mr peabody's cold train. How did he wait?
Speaker 1:that's insane. I was not aware that big. That's heavy out there in ohio.
Speaker 2:That's 325 tons in one bite. Yep, that's insane. So okay, I'm learning about. They had to use charges to blow it, to scrap it when they needed to scrap that thing wow.
Speaker 1:So I'm reading. The story of this is on Caterpillar's own websites is the story of Big Muskie. They say that this crane it stood 22 stories high, had a 330 foot twin boom and a 220 yard bucket the size of a 12 car garage bucket the size of a 12 car garage. When they finally scrapped it, they got 27 million pounds of metal out of it.
Speaker 2:Imagine that guy at the scrapyard the day the truck started rolling in.
Speaker 1:He didn't have enough cash in the drawer let me tell you there's some old dude with a shopping cart full of aluminum cans just shaking his head. Like I'm stuck behind these dudes in the line brutal I didn't even think about it like that.
Speaker 2:This guy's got a garden, two hefty bags full of cans and they're like just come back tomorrow fred it's gonna be a little while we haven't even sorted the copper yet oh man, that's something that I don't think our kids will ever do.
Speaker 1:The the old you know they go around and get a bunch of scrap and take it down to the recycling yard no, no, they're not gonna do that.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you the kids see, there was a time when you could go around and you could collect that stuff and then and then you realize that add value, you go scrap it and then you would have just enough money to, like, buy, like a cheeseburger or something, or something cool for your bike, and then you would utilize that Right. So, but there was effort in, or returning glass bottles back for the deposit money because some, some drunkard down the street was too lazy to do it or too drunk all the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you get a nickel a bottle.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Again, the world always goes back to Seinfeld. Seinfeld did an episode on this when they were going to Michigan with the cans and the bottles, because it's a lost thing.
Speaker 1:Yes, I think a lot of that whole era that has been lost really was captured in seinfeld. It is such a funny show because it's this time capsule where you know. I've tried to show it to my kids and it doesn't resonate with them because they grew up with cell phones, right, and how many of the problems in that show would have been solved instantaneously by a cell phone Like the way we've been texting each other.
Speaker 2:They would have just said Kramer fell. Okay, done, done, that'd be it, yeah.
Speaker 1:Or like hey, I'm at this this person's house, what's the address?
Speaker 3:here I am, instead of trying to where they get stuck at that one you know getting lost at the mall, Getting lost at the mall garage.
Speaker 2:Like there were all these things that happened. Now I will say this. I will say this the world slowed down a lot before cell phones. Yes, because the expectation before cell phones was he will get back to me. I know this guy and he will call me back. And if I wait here by this phone, I'll be within earshot of it. He will call me back. And people did this.
Speaker 2:Runners dedicated to getting the phone for executives to go hold on a second and set the phone down and go get the guy and have him come back to talk on the phone to you know, like that was a whole thing and people don't, you know, I think. I mean, look at when we talk about truck stops and stuff, and I've mentioned this before. But you know, years ago there was a phone room and you'd just be a counter and it was just phones with stools. You had booths with phones in them. I mean, when I was a kid we used to do they call home. Yeah, you know construction sites. There were no phone issues. There were no ear pods. Truck drivers weren't driving with headphones, that you know. You stopped to use the phone. Yeah, songs about this stuff, highways and back roads. This country sure is beautiful.
Speaker 3:But a byway ain't home. You might gaze upon some land I thought I'd never see, but it feels like someone else's life and it don't belong to me. I'm so tired of being alone In technical motels Watching late night talking shows. Lately I've felt like a roadshot full of holes, leaving everything behind me Everywhere I go. This ain't my bed, what I chose. I used to be outnumbered, but now I'm just a ghost.
Speaker 2:I'm just a ghost and you know it was just a thing, and I think today, yeah, well, the technology is life-saving and we got to have it and it helps in so many ways, it hinders in a lot of ways, especially men who would say I'm not going to carry around this leash all the time because the the thinking was it is a very sexist way of thinking.
Speaker 1:I'm not in any way endorsing it, I'm just saying this was the thinking of the time of the era, right, right, that. Well, I don't want my wife to just call me whenever she wants. I'm down at the bar with my buddies, or I'm going golfing or something I don't want to be. You know, getting her phone call telling me to go pick up milk, or where am I? Or anything like that. And that was really the mentality.
Speaker 1:That was a leash and yeah, now I think the other way now it's the other way, but it's still a leash because, like, I'll give you an example, as we're recording, as we normally record the middle of the day, but we're recording today, tonight, because we, because we're trying to get ahead, mike's going to be traveling, I'm going to be traveling, so we want to have some episodes in the bank, so we're recording this in the evening, which is not what we usually do. I got a text from work while we were sitting here recording and sitting down already, and the expectation is that I'm going to drop whatever I'm doing, my time with my family, hop on my laptop, check out my work, email and solve a problem. Number one I'm not going to do that. This is not an overtime gig. I apologize to anyone listening. That's not what we do here.
Speaker 1:So, number one, I'm not going to do that. But number two, that's the expectation of everybody. That's the expectation, whether you're working in a mall, whether you're working at Starbucks, that someone's going to call you or text you and expect you to solve a problem on your own, and your friends don't have an obligation to it. Your friends don't have a right to it. Your family don't have a right to it. That it's your time has completely gone away.
Speaker 2:No you're right and there's. You know this goes along with everything heavy that we talked about already in this podcast. You also have the soft side of it, which is, you know, most people when they get done running that heavy equipment okay, and it's taxing mentally, sometimes physically, sometimes both. Yeah, back in the day, when all that stuff that we talked about. You're talking about expedition to the Arctic circle. We're talking about a scraper that can move an enormous amount of material in a single pass. We you know. Then we're talking about the big musky right, one of the biggest shovels ever devised by man. Imagine the crew running that and when they got done.
Speaker 2:There were no cell phones. Right, there was a phone in it, though, but there were no cell phones. But imagine that when they got done and there's many studies about this everybody that worked had the third place. Yes, and the third place was the VFW, the Eagles, the club hall, anything like that. That was not home and was not work. It was their social network, it was any kind of thing like that, and those have dwindled because your social network is now tied to a phone. That and those have dwindled because your social network is now tied to a phone. And when you erode personal interconnection like that in person, it just degrades the whole thing and what it does do and this is something that people are studying now, because this has been going on long enough it goes full circle and it erodes work and home.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it does, because the lack of boundaries and the lack of that ability to be you right, and so what I mean by that is like at work, I am work Joe. At home with my kids and my wife, I'm family Joe that ability to just joe outside of that and just like be me as I am, on my own, is totally gone and oh, look at, look at most of the drivers on the road today.
Speaker 2:They've got the, they have the bluetooth headset on, they're on the phone almost non-stop. Okay, you, you know it used to be. You would chatter, chatter on the CB, or you would. You know, if you were in a company, if you're in a heavy piece of equipment on a job, you would chatter on the company radio and the foreman would chatter on his radio to the guys that were running equipment and there'd be some friendly banter. And then you know, when something happened you would talk about something serious. But that's all gone now with cell phones. And then the worst thing now is you got the cell phones, you got the company radio going at the same time.
Speaker 1:It's just a distraction. It's a distraction. I want to get back to this, though, because we talk a lot about socioeconomic stuff on this show.
Speaker 1:We have since episode one and something that you and I have kind of always bantered about and kind of found that common bond in that it's a common interest of ours.
Speaker 1:I want to run something past you and get your sense on this. When we think back to like and let's call it the glory days of trucking just to last, just to have a term to use, right, right, and we think about those phone banks and we think about you know, that local tavern where, that bar, where everybody knows your name, right, and you go and you have regulars there and you have that third place, I think a lot of that, especially in the early 70s and into the mid 70s and even into the early 80s a little bit, was because we had a strong dollar. The dollar would actually go far enough. We had stronger union representation for a lot of these blue collar workers and you could afford to do stuff like that. If I decide today, in 2024, and I do well, you do well, we're comfortable guys On the way home from work if I stop to go eat somewhere and I just want to have, you know, a couple of bar snacks and one or two beers, I'm spending 20, 30 bucks at a cheap place.
Speaker 2:That's right. And if you bring you bring your significant other and then maybe you buy a couple of drinks for somebody that stops by, that you know. Next, you know that's a hundred bucks.
Speaker 1:That's it, and it's something that is not sustainable in the way that it used to be, and I think it's got a little bit to do with inflation, it's got a little bit to do with the degradation of the dollar, it's got a lot to do with wages, especially for the working man, especially for the manufacturers and the ground level people on the front lines every day in America.
Speaker 1:Their wages are not keeping pace with stock prices, with CEO rate, with C-level suite rate. And when I think about stuff like that, I look at these things and I see there's a new deal at the Freightliner factory, there's a new deal at John Deere, there's a new deal happening at Volkswagen at the Chattanooga plant we talked about a couple of days ago. That does bring me hope that we are going to start to write some of these wrongs. Maybe wrong isn't the thing, but, let's say, write some of these oversights where it was getting better for an entire class of people. But there was a group of Americans and it was the Americans that were building the roads and building the infrastructure and building the world around us.
Speaker 2:They got paid because they they it was warranted because of what they were doing. That's it. And you know, yeah, and if we're going to talk about that here's, here's something I'm going to tell you. There was a nobility to the work that was being done. It has been eroded by time.
Speaker 2:People built the Hoover Dam, people built the highway system, people built the skyscrapers with hot rivets and cold steel. Those people were considered noble men that did the unthinkable, did the undoable, but they figured out how to do it and they were paid very handsomely for it. And they weren't paid over and above, but they were paid quite a bit for it. And I can tell you that we eroded that Okay, and it didn't keep up. There was a very strong speech by Jimmy Hoffa that he did as teamster president, and one of the taglines in that speech was they were going to bring the working man into the middle class and they were going to promote, they were going to essentially move the middle class forward. Okay, because there was a time where people that drove made less than I mean they were just above poverty. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2:And then the unions. It doesn't matter what union you're in, the unions work together to get those workers into the middle class. Yes, then they gain momentum. And then they got to the upper end of that. If you want to get into class wars, they get into the upper end of the middle class. And then you had white collar workers that were joining unions. You had guys that were well, you know what, I'll, I'll, I'll join the operators, I'll join the teamsters, I'll join the mill rights. And you know what? I wear a white collar shirt every day, but you know what? They have a hell of a pension and I'll just pay into that. And then I'm going to unionize a bunch of guys, and then we're going to do that too. That started to happen. Then somehow we slipped, and I can tell you why. And if you're going to get into that whole ordeal, that is a scary thing, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's a scary thing when, when you have union working men and women and they have the country tied up because they feel that something is an injustice, that is a disruption to the entire way that the whole economic circle works.
Speaker 1:Sure, but we've got a scenario that's not the whole reason of the union.
Speaker 2:The union is to be fair, to create working environments, to create wages that are competitive, that are consistent with our economic surroundings of the time and era that we're talking about. And my dad talks about times back in the 70s and the 60s. He's like, no, nobody made an exorbitant amount of money, but he goes. You know what? You went and you bought a candy bar for a nickel and he said gas was only so many cents a gallon and all those things were proportionalized back. So the inflation over time has created this constant evolution. I think that this is this. You know, we talk about this a lot at work. We talk a lot about this with the union.
Speaker 2:As the unions renegotiate, as the unions come out with new contracts locally to my office, they just release all those contracts in May there is some serious cost of living increases, unprecedented in those packages that are renegotiated out over so many years. So a lot of the unions just put out this whole escalation. They say, okay, over so many years you're going to get this, but they adjust those year to year. It's very important that this keeps happening. Yeah, and the working man and woman cannot slide backwards at this point, because what you're going to have is you already have people that don't want to do the work. We already have people that don't want to come to work. You're going to make it worse, You're going to make it worse.
Speaker 1:I spent the morning today at the international brotherhood of electrical workers here in illinois and, first of all, a better god bless, yeah, a better group of guys and girls you're never going to meet and they were talking all about electric. And, in honor of this being biff's special episode, we're going to save that conversation for the next one and we're going to close out with the heaviest thing, I think, that we've talked about in a while the union pacific railroad, which has shaved two days off of its turnaround time from california, which is, um, I don't know, the two days from la to chicago. That seems like it's. That seems like a lot how are you?
Speaker 1:doing. They're moving, they are. They're moving a ton and they're doing all the same routes. They're not cutting back any kind of production. And uh, from city of industry in southern california to global two in north lake illinois, they're getting there now two days faster. So that's 70 mile an hour average service. And they're doing it with their new engines. They're saying they're reducing greenhouse gas emissions by up to 75%. That's a tremendous accomplishment. This is like the old 1920s when you'd hear about this is the record run from Lake Havasu to Niagara Falls. You know, it's that kind of vibe.
Speaker 2:And I think it's cool. And when you used to leave out of Chicago and you would run out to LA in a passenger train that would eclipse 100 mile an hour. Back then and you're talking about you know you had the steely-eyed missile men engineers sitting up front with their jackets on and their stuff's half unbuttoned and they got their gloves right on the throttle and they're leaning into that thing. They got all these lives behind them. Yeah, they just wanted to get there thousands everybody was along for the ride they're.
Speaker 2:They're in their vista dome looking at the mountains and they're like god, I hope we get there. So this is the same kind of thing you're exactly right now. We're moving freight at this kind of average speed and then, on top of that, reducing greenhouse gases by 75% through diesel electric. That's amazing, and the railroads have been the mother of invention forever.
Speaker 1:Well, that's just it. I mean, if you're sitting here, turbine oil, diesel heavy fuels coal. They've done it all, They've done it all they've done it all they've done.
Speaker 2:Nuclear trains the soviets had nuclear powered trains back in the 60s easy hey, you know, no, I'm kidding but no, they did, they did and they were, they were working with that the nice thing about those was you didn't have to put lights on them. They already glowed in the dark and the snow never stuck to the rail, my friend snow never stuck to the rail the steely eyed engineer had six eyes like blinky the fish from the simpsons.
Speaker 2:But that thing was moving I think it was moving when it went by. It reminds me of the days when my grandmother used to talk about a specter locomotive that would rocket past the farmhouse little did.
Speaker 1:She know it was a communist plot to destabilize america's democracy we have to edit that out we're not.
Speaker 2:That's how we're closing it, but that's the way from union pacific on here, because seriously you're talking about heavy equipment and you want to talk about heavy stuff and their maintenance program. All their stuff is just next level, next level.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and they are incredibly efficient the way they do things. They're not wasting any time. They're not wasting any money. They deserve every penny they make and probably two or three more. They do incredible stuff out there. So look, that was it, biff. I hope you liked it. We didn't talk about nothing electric except the tesla that got crushed underneath the big mac and, uh, you know, hopefully it wasn't yours.