Sturgill Simpson Horrifies Joe Rogan With Gruesome Train Stories

Did you ever see that Tom Cruise movie about Barry Seal? Yes. It's all about that. It's all about a few cowboys, rogue CIA agents that decided to try to make a little money. My buddy Caleb is in that movie for like five minutes and he steals the whole fucking thing. He plays his wife's younger brother. Oh yeah. The degenerate dipshit. Yeah. He was awesome. He's a great, he's a funny dude. It's a lot like the bluegrass conspiracy. You know about that? What's that? The bluegrass, there was basically, it was a Lexington, Kentucky police officer. Oh man. It went all the way up to the governor's office. Yeah, and it was deep in Kentucky politics for years and years and years. And he was flying a plane, a little prop plane with weed and like money, millions of dollars in cocaine. He crashed in Knoxville, Tennessee and they found everything. They didn't know he was a police officer until he died and he was like. He jumped out of the plane with a parachute with the coke strapped to him. The way the fuck to shoot up. Gucci loafers. They found him on the ground with his shoot half open and just like, pfft. Yeah. Like a powder poke. Yeah. And a bear also ate all the cocaine. And died, right? He got a big strawberry shortcake just laying there in a horse farm field. There's pictures of all. Well, not all of that. How much coke does it take to kill a bear? It says how much he ate. I don't know off the top of my head. Poor thing. I think they have it stuffed in Lexington. Listen. That's a really good book. You should read that book, Bluegrass conspiracy. Yeah. Because it wanted the true story, but it, small state level corruption at the utmost level in terms of drugs. Pablo Escobar. Pablo Escobar. This is the story of the legendary cocaine bear of Kentucky. That's it. Wow. Is that the bear they mounted him? Wow. That's it. It's fucking, he's got a fucking side on his neck It's this cocaine bear. I think that's a company. I love Kentucky. Kentucky for Kentucky. That's what it is. That's like a gold chain. That's like he's a rapper. Look, he's got his hat sideways. He's got a fucking sign around his neck. It says cocaine bear. It's all gold. Well. Bluegrass. Bluegrass baby. I got to read it. I definitely had heard about the bear eating the coke. The Barry Seals one is a terrible one because the reason why they found out about it is because these two kids found the coke drop. They found the coke and they wound up murdering these two kids when they went to achieve the coke and they put their bodies on the railroad tracks. And they told the parents that the kids got high and fell asleep on the railroad tracks. But the parents did an independent autopsy and they found stab wounds in the kids. You know it's really fucked up also. We'll give that away. I've seen that when like transients or bums come in on. It's always, part of our, we would have to find like young kids and shit playing hop car and you know doing the gutter rat lifestyle and a thousand dollar fucking North Face Parkas and shit. Usually what are you doing man? You're gonna die. Right. But like bums would come in on the trains. And this didn't happen on our yards or the North Guard, this guy. He thought they were done with the movement. You know you took 5,700 foot steel with fucking 45,000 horsepower on the front of it. Like when it starts moving, it's very sudden. So if you just go to stand up all that thing, all of a sudden when it starts rolling and then you lose your footing and you fall down the tracks between the cars, but when you get run over by a train, it's not bloody and messy. Because especially if it's been on the mainline, it's rolling really hard and hot. You put a limb on a track or a body or a corpse, all that weight and friction and heat when it goes over, it just cuts it like butter and carterizes everything, like pinches you off like sausage. So we find pieces, not a mess, just pieces. Oh my God. Unless you hit a fucking cow or something, standing in the middle of the track and you're going 70 miles an hour and then it's just asshole and guts hanging off the front of the train. Does that even slow the train down? No, not at all. A cow doesn't slow the train down. It's less than a bug on your windshield. Whoa. Yeah. Could you imagine being in the fucking seat, the driver's seat? I've done it. You've actually seen a cow? Yeah, I've operated locomotives. I've never hit a cow, but I've definitely driven a train. But what was the biggest thing you hit? I didn't really hit anything. Nothing? No. I mean, imagine though, being in the seat of cows. I only operated one within the yard, so probably like 35, 40 miles an hour tops. But on the mainline, when they're really rolling, they're doing like 70, 72 miles an hour. Like I said, it's a mile and a half long train with four or five locomotives on the front of it, all with 30,000 horsepower each. So look, I mean, it's a bag of fucking blood, man. You're not even gonna, but it just like. Do they have special fronts that are designed to hit things like that? Yeah, it's a big giant steel plow. It's designed to push 10 feet of fucking snow out of the way it has to. Whoa. Yeah. So like essentially like those things that semis used for deer on the middle of the night, those giant, big things. But it's actually a big steel shovel with like an ax wedge in it. Whoa. And it just kind of, it just hangs and it sits about six inches off the rail itself. And its whole idea is to just splatter everything. Just push anything out of the way and destroy it. So to keep the train from derailing. Because the only thing holding those things on the rail, the inner flange of a wheel set, there's like a little three quarter inch lip that kind of hangs over on the inside of the rails. So it's all just gravity and downforce keeping that thing going. So you could put like a brick, technically, you could take anything, a piece of fucking metal or a car jack and just lay it on that thing. When that train hits it at 70 miles an hour, it's coming off the rail. And everything behind it is still going 70 miles an hour stacking up behind it. And I mean, you don't think about, every time you pull up to a crossing in the city and you see a train go by 10 miles an hour and there's like 20 tankers on there full of raw chlorine, you could really fuck some shit up if you knew what you were doing. Kill the whole city, you derail that train. We'd have to think about that and like Homeland Security would come out and we'd have to have courses and shit. But you have so many miles of track. Oh yeah. How do you make sure that nobody does anything? There are crews that drive that track on a daily basis and repair things. Dude, you're freaking me out. Fuck train. That's why I quit the job. I watched enough of those things happen right in front of me and it was my job to clean them up and get a crane out there. I had a fucking cot in my office. I would live at the yard for three or four days until we got everything repaired and back together and rolling. But like, you know, two or three times where you'd be sitting out there in the middle of the switching leads, this happened where I'd be in a pickup truck at night or during the daytime, like with one of the guys I work with. You know, maybe it's a guy you're tired, you're trying to get done early and you got a bunch of empty cars on the back and the dude puts the throttle down before the air goes through the system all the way to the rear of the train. So you know, you got this dead weight and he thinks, oh fuck it, I got three locomotives, I can push it, it'll be okay. Until when they designed the system 100 plus years ago, nothing has changed since then. It's a very primitive functional air brake system design. You hook all these hoses up from the front to the back, it runs air through, which allows the brakes to release. So then the engineer can control those brakes. Well, if the air doesn't go all the way to the back, the brakes are still on those cars. So when all this horsepower, pushing rolling metal hits metal that does not want to roll, it just buckles up in a TP, almost instantaneously, goes off and you won't even feel it if you're 30 cars up that you're pushing shit into the dirt and it's all just piling on top of itself. And like, I went in like two seconds, I watched this train go from being on the track to literally digging out a 10 foot trough of earth and just displacing it. And I think like every day, me or one of my guys is standing right there. I was like, I'm gonna go write songs. Dude, good thinking. Yeah. Yeah, very good thinking. It's a good job, but it should have killed it. Somewhere someone is on a fucking train listening to this, freaking out. Freaking out, they're just about to go to sleep. I'll just listen to Tergil Simpson. They should just go write songs, brother. Yeah. Right on. Woo. Yeah. Yeah.