Safety in the 1950's HIT DIFFERENTLY... Literally. | Railroader Reacts
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 ก.พ. 2025
- Railroad safety videos are usually a deluge of boring, obnoxious, corporate blegh. This one, from the D&RGW back in the day, is quite entertaining, and a "little extra", as it were.
Cheers to Drew Sparkmon for uploading it. Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of dead space in the video, so I trimmed it pretty heavily for your enjoyment. The full videos are below:
Part 1: • Rio Grande Railroad Sa...
Past 2: • Rio Grande Railroad Sa...
Merch: hyce.creator-s...
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I didn't expect a 50's railroad safety to have such a deep hitting portrayal of the finality of death
To be fair its post WW 2, the audience then had newsreels during WW 2 and the warcrimes trials. A lot of what survived was edited (for television and later movies)from what was distributed.
Check out shake hands with danger for another good one haha
Gotta shake people out of complacency somehow, especially back when, if I'm not mistaken, focus on safety was still kinda new. Like, early in the video, it sounds like steel-toed footwear wasn't mandatory. (But I'm not an expert on the history of industrial safety training.)
@@BudderCraft526 "Why don't they look?"
Right about that, it’s almost a Horror Movie!
I wish that safety videos were still done like this
failvideos now serve this purpose :P
Did you ever see the one about Klaus, the forklift operator?
Shake hands with danger
@@zenjon7892 _dun du-duh-dun dunnnnnnnnn_
@@zenjon7892 Three finger Joe is that you?
"He got his name in the papers, but nobody reads his own obituary" is an absolute monster of a line.
The "here's why you don't do this" type safety training presentations we had to watch when I was in automotive school did not use play acting and dummies to get their point across and some of those images are still seared into my mind fifteen years later in a way I very much wish they weren't, but I get why they do it that way. There's no room for subtlety in saying, hey, pay attention, we aren't messing around here, this will straight up maim or kill your ass.
It don't haunt me, but I still remember what the outcome looks like when motorist tries to take on a semi, he was scattered in a few hundred feet along the highway and insides wrapped around dually trailer wheels.
There was once a short period of a time where in england they showed real outcomes of motorcycle vs. car accidents.
The sight in public television primetime where top half of a motorist went over a passenger car and lower half went through the car was somewhat too mutch for regular viewer, but there was a noticeable drop in accidents where cars drove in front of a motorcycle even that advertisement was in television for just a few commercial breaks.
If it hits you hard enough you'll tend to remember it
@@felixchaus For me it was, in particular, photographs of valve spring versus eyeball, and long hair versus helicopter main rotor mast.
@@starlightnixie Sounds delightfully sickening.
In my college chemistry class, the poster to drive home safe use of glassware was an actual picture of a previous student impaling their hand on a pipette
I saw that sort of thing in middle school, and then I started looking up Chechen war crimes videos and eventually became a firefighter. I guess some people arer just built differently haha. I miss ogrish and liveleak.
As a man who is going into OSHA for a field, this was amazing and I loved it. Now I need to get a box full of fake eyes to scare some people into wearing PPE
Couldn't you find anything productive that you were capable of mastering?
THIS could happen to YOU!
I had to watch a cheesy ass forklift video about people getting hurt with forklifts then osha had a guy who would give you a test then give you a card that you knew forklift safety. lol I also have a card that i was given to me by the state, im trained to use a respirator and to train others on the use of them as well.
Everyone, boo this man! Booooo!
Wow, the D&RGW really committed to that bit! And your commentary added a lot of good context, especially explaining the vital “the rules are written in blood” idea. This video may look old now, around 7 decades later, but imagine what these Rio Grande workers would have thought of the brutality of safety culture 7 decades before them, in the 1880s!
No kidding...
It's very much the same in aviation. A lot of federal regulations came about because of fatal accidents, often when the fatalities numbered in the hundreds because of neglect (on the part of either the manufacturer, the maintenance or ground operations crews, or the pilot in command.)
@@Dumbrarere I was popping down here to say the same thing, lol (laughing at how you beat me to the punch by like 4 months, not the way the rules are written)
Makes me wonder if there's some old actual film of brakemen walking on top of cars and setting the brakes for a moving train. Maybe in winter. In a snow storm. It would be fun/scary to watch.
We need Hyce’s face at 3:18 as a membership chat sticker
Someone tell Mickely to make it so :P
I watched an old training video about train yard operations earlier this year, and one of the things the narrator said was "Don't be a dummy." There was a dummy in the shot at the same time, which made me laugh a little.
Wow...when the Title said "Hit Differently...Literally" I was NOT expecting the Eyeballs, and neither were the workers who lost them to Recklessness
At my train crew class, we watched a video from UP called "Getting Off On The Right Foot". Ironically, we didn't watch the video until AFTER we had practiced boarding and dismounting a moving train.
I remember watching that one. "It doesn't hurt, not if you have a wooden leg."
“The rules are written in blood” is not just used on the rails, but in the skies too. I cannot tell how many times I have heard thst phrase in aviation.
It goes for everything including everything from laws to medical regulations
The tool check portion definitely gives me vibes of Santa Fe's own safety video in the 1970's called "Team Effort".
The whole collection of Santa Fe training films are in the Pentrex video "Working on the Santa Fe"; some of them could be nice follow-ups to this D&RGW one.
Good to know :) if it's pentrex it may be harder for me to react to, but we'll see. Copyright shenanigans...
@@Hyce777 If you need to ask for the rights to watch it on your YT channel, you could possibly argue that it will help some future railroaders who might want to work on the Santa Fe by exposing them to the safety videos in advance, and it might inspire people to sign on to work on the Santa Fe line
Hyce just convinced me to watch a safety video voluntary. Great stuff tho!
Fun fact: Alfred E. Pearlman would go on to be in charge of multiple different railroads over his career, including a time with New York Central and PennCentral
Yep and a lot of foamers don't like em cause he hated steam locomotives
"What, me worry?"
And also Alfred Perlman managed to save western pacific, and turn its bad situation around before union pacific purchase it
@@IndustrialParrot2816 Standing near a turbo coal fire and a loose pile of coal with a hot high pressure boiler while rolling across a bridge with 8 cars behind it filled does sound a bit unsafe, but I say steam locomotives are cooler than most other forms of train and that makes them better.
@randompersonwhocomments3645 And that's why D&RGW 683 is the only surviving standard gauge steamer.
Shake Hands With Danger. These videos are historical. I currently work in Building Inspection. Most of the old timers were in the trades before joining. Some had short finders. They share enough horror stories to remind you to be safe. I had some people working on my house, one of them shot themselves with a nail gun. When I talked about it at work I got 4 stories of similar incidents from 3 people.
Shake Hands With Danger is the best.
*Epic guitar rift*
Awesome, now I can protect my mind and limbs at the same time. Thanks hyce!
Football and railroading also have extremely dedicated fanbases
It's amazing how they survived without any HiVis clothing. Seeing that slide fence, one of the scarier moments of my career was being up a signal with a double stack freighter coming past at track speed.
I wonder if the 50s narrator would have had something snarky for that :P
When I see men is reflective vests, chaps, or hard hats, face shields and earpro.....and they're standing around watching someone work...........
In terms of showing the serious consequences, this feels like one of the better vintage safety videos. Would also be fun to see a reaction to UP's "Getting off on the Right Foot" sometime.
That's a classic.
I genuinely think safety videos that show “this is what happens when you fuck up” are the most useful, other examples I can think of are the shake hands with danger CAT safety video and that claus forklift safety video
There really was in some places a “we die like men” mentality, or just a general sense of “I know better than they do up top, I’ll do things my way”. Something this harsh on reality might be needed to help cut through that.
I’ve seen the results of why the rule “always set handbrakes on your equipment”, including a smashed up speeder!
Here in the UK we still have torpedos as part of the emergency kit on both trains and track-gangs.
Although i don't know how often they get used as part of routine work, since, as you said, signals do most of the job now.
Especially since most of the UK network is somewhat interconnected to allow bypass routes on closed tracks, so often routes are entirely closed to facilitate work.
they still get used every day/night to protect possessions and as additional protection for line blocks
This is good and your commentary is always appreciated.
Have you ever seen the german forklift safety video with klaus? We need a Hyce-reacts to that one just for the funsies.
I *love* that video. One of my favorites.
18:06 "Every safety rule grows out of tragedy and grim experience." Truer words have rarely been spoken.
I'm a truck driver. One of the lumber mills we go to makes you watch a security camera clip of a guy getting run over by a big forklift. I also pretended to be a safety officer for a year and I definitely learned that when you're being told to do something by safety, there's a reason. In part because operations gets to say no to anything we don't have an ironclad argument for.
So you drive around on the highway, the most dangerous place to work aside from the sea or a farm, and you wouldn't know to look out for forklifts?
My grandfather was in ww2, then a millwright until he retired. One day we were doing something and I didn't have my safety glasses on. I was like 10 years old.
He said "You ever see a man with 1 eye?"
I said "no. I haven't."
"Well if you lose an eye you'll only see half as many! Put your glasses on!"
"Why didn't they save one of those?"
Because Alfred E. Perlman was in charge of that road, and he:
Wants!
That!
_STEAM ENGINE!_
_chainsaw rev_
I recently started working for a railroad and on day two we got to watch some so called "Ouch-videos" where some trainers got together and essentially made short, badly acted youtube videos recreating accidents that actually happened. No corporate animations, just some dudes with no acting training doing some acting. It was wonderful. Not as nostalgia inducing as this, but well done. They also did some interviews with the actual people who were in those accidents
See now, here's me thinking this isn't one little bit extra. Unlike modern safety videos in most jobs, this got the point across, efficiently, and effectively. This is the sort of safety briefing I used to get, and give, when I did stunt performance. No bs, straight up "this is the hazard, it will kill you, like it did to X last year, don't do this" - that way, it's rare you need to expound the virtue of being safe about it more than just the once to each person involved in planning a stunt.
That's definitely fair.
1:19 we need a soundbite of hyce saying USE YOUR H E A D
Yes. I'd buy it and use it as ALL my tones!
In the helicopter world, they make us watch actual footage of an incident where someone wasn't paying attention and walked into a tail rotor. I think safety videos are just always grim. But you never forget them.
And lathe videos. Man the lathe really is the scariest tool in the shop
Oh yowza.
And yeah, lathes are terrifying.
@@Hyce777
You can get sliced like a piece o´cake by a column drill if you are too lazy to use the damn vice. A friend of mine had a colleague in automotive shop class who thought it would be a great idea to drill a 15mm hole into a thick piece not starting small but with the big drill bit and the drill spinning way too fast and sent that piece of steel flying through the shop. Luckily nobody got hurt that day.
90% of all my safety meetings could be summed up by 'Don't Stand Between The Weird Shiny Things!'
btw in england it is still common place on the Absolute Block lines to protect work with Detonators ( or as apparently called in the US "torpedoes?")
It would be neat to see you make your own railroad safety video and talk about the proper way to handle the equipment.
I remember seeing a video like this from GN filmed in the 40s. More than a few practices were seen that would never be allowed today
Hey the great northern is my local fallen flag railroad
"Why Risk Your Life?"
I kinda wish safety vids like these still got made (and if they are they got distributed better)
The company I work with has a lot of safety training but they don't seem to work on some of our more...
Stubborn individuals
Having video of actual physical events might work better than the dry "read this and then answer these questions" we currently have
Always a good day when Mark uploads!
As somebody that has to watch nearly 20 hours of videos a year to stay compliant for my job, I wish they were little more like this. If they were not so watered down it would make them a little more relatable and memorable.
Normally I ignore safety vids but the built in humor demands attention.
It would be amazing to find out this guy narrated a whole series of various industries' safety videos. I'd be here for them all.
It's no Shake Hands with Danger, but that narrator was savage at 17:18 when he referred to accidents caused by inattention, negligence, etc. as suicides.
S-2's, C-48's, and that L-105 at the end... On the note of destroying equipment, one of the mines I worked at up in the Powder River Basin actually had a live demonstration of what a 240 ton capacity haul truck would do to a crew van. The haul truck, the size of a two story house, didn't even flinch. The van ended the same thickness as the engine block.
Maybe that tally is from the day before? Like, every morning without incident he goes and updates it. You never know when you're gonna get a call that an employee of yours accidentally threw out his back.
Wait.
A.E Perlman
ALFRED IS THAT YOU!
"How would you like to go through this operation 3 or 4 times a day for the rest of your life?"
Well... I wasn't prepared for that shot....
Oh no it's Perlman, Hide your steam engines! I guess this must have been during his rage against motocars phase.
This is a very good video Hyce, I love your videos talking about trains
Best safety video I’ve ever seen. (Also the only safety video I’ve ever seen.)
I just came back to your channel. I'm impressed to see that it has grown.
This was by far the most effective safety video I have ever watched. Absolute gem.
I think the willingness to potentially damage expensive locomotives is even more impressive than destroying those service cars. Granted, they're *probably* not going to sustain damage, but it's hardly a certainty.
My brother is the one who uploaded the DRGW video from one of our dad's VHS's. This is kind of his intention of uploading it. He was a huge fan of MST3K and we always watched their famous UP Grade Crossing reaction to "Last Clear Chance" and always thought what they did in this was perfect for that same sort of set up. I have no idea why our dad had the Rio Grande safety video, given we lived and always lived in West Virginia, but glad you found it and put it to use.
wow that was very interesting to watch thanks hyce.
The value of an eye is out of sight, that’s on a old safety poster at the railroad I work at.
The safety lecture and all that are cool, but the fact that an adult male sees a clip of an articulated steam locomotive and says, "Ooooh, big choo choo," has me in stitches!! Great video as always.
Interestingly enough the A.E Pearlman mentioned in the video is Alfred E Pearlman, he went on to become CEO of New York Central and he was responsible for the scrapping for most of the NYC steamers
I work at a ir- g a. s. These videos are a lot funnier than the ones they show us at our job. Thank you for your video really enjoyed it
I remember a story I heard from a MOW worker for the Lehigh Valley railroad. They were doing track work and had the track jacked up on multiple track jacks when the crack fast freight "The Mercury" came into view. They scrambled out of the way and the train blew through, snapping the heads off of all of the jacks.
Damn...the crack I made about Buster Keaton in the teaser you put up yesterday was more spot-on than I realized. Tell me I'm wrong to say the folks who produced this used *The General* as a template. (Just a bit more brutal for getting the point across.) Great stuff, and cool commentary, Hyce!
The old ones are the best, they are entertaining enough to keep you paying attention and they show you the actual consequences. The old videos for fixing semi trucks are the same way, they show a guy getting launched because they were inflating a tire with a incorrectly installed multi piece rim.
The old school voice over guy, I think did every voice over from the 1940s to 1960s.
Imagine being a railroad worker involved on a safety film set, and the director walks up to you before filming and says:
"Alright, so heres a hundred bucks. What i'm gonna need you to do is take out that speeder, but don't follow proper procedures, sloppily take it out of the shed, aaaaaaand get your foot run over during the process...you're gonna do great!"
This video 100% applies to shortlines still lol, I watched the UP version in orientation. My boss was like “yeah we don’t use speeders anymore so just pretend it’s a hi-rail truck, but everything else we still use”
I teach chemistry in college - I can confirm that telling people to put on their eye protection is never going to be fun. XD
The amount of Destruction in this video lol
Hey thanks man :) and yeah lol
16:50 Rio Grande apparantely had dual gauge track on some parts of The line.
They had many sections of dual gauge.
That old safety video certainly hit differently.
we need a "Shake Hands With Danger" style railroad safety video
When I was in middleschool, our shop teacher made everyone start by watching a safety video that included actual footage from the surgery to save a machinist's eye when he took a broken drill bit to the face. It was... memorable.
There's a few phrases with safety last
uphill Slow, Downhill Fast, Tonnage first, Safety last
uphill Slow, Downhill Fast, Profit first, Safety last
uphill Slow, Downhill Fast, bodies first, Safety last
You're welcome
Helped our MOW crew (father and son) with some ballast replacement last week. A backhoe helps but it’s still pretty physical
One thing that slightly hurts though
Having a 1922 fairmont and spending a lot of time researching fairmonts, the ones that they wrecked looked to be early fairmont speeders.
There are not very many many early fairmonts left so seeing them wreck early ones is kind of sad
They didn't know that then, it is sad looking back.
@@Hyce777
Yep
At that time it was a way to get rid of the worn out old equipment. Much like when railroads took their old engines for running into each other as a tourist thing
I know Alfred E. Perlman worked on the penn central, new york central, and western pacific...but i did not know he worked on the rio grande!
*"no wonder only one standard gauge rio grande steam engine (683) was preserved"* 💀💀😂😂😂
Hi Mark, Fabulous period safety film. Totally corny dialogue but certainly a product of its time. The eyeball sequence made me look away OMG 🤣. Seriously though, it is well put and as you say still has many relevant things to tell us today. Cool to see all those period choo choos as well as the tools and workwear. Safety boots and glasses gotta have ‘em! Thanks again Professor for sharing this and as usual love your giggle reactions and educational commentary. Cheers!
13:30 And this is why you have to borrow those stinky steel toed boots whenever you visit a factory floor or construction site or anywhere else people work with heavy equipment.
Steel toed boots aren't required unless your specific company requires it, around heavy equipment they can make things worse by severing your toes rather than just crushing them
@@noodlelynoodle. That is complete nonsens.
Anything that can make even a small dent in a steel cap will completely obllterate your foot, ithose forces will turn your foot into as thin layer of meat paste with bone dust, there is nothing left to save.
Just check Mythbusters, they might be entertaining, but that nonsense you just spewd is one of the things they debunked.
You might just as well try to rebuld a cow from a hamburger putty that has been run over by a steam roller-
~20:35 "When you put the board on (scaffolding), use plenty of nails. They're cheaper than accidents" 😂Gotta love sassy narrator
At 11:50 we hear, "Place your hands down far enough on the claw bar to avoid smashing them on the opposite rail."
I've got a better idea. Make the claw bar shorter so that it is impossible to do that.
Hyce, you think the narrator is responsible for the comments and the quality thereof? It's not him. The script was written for him, and it was up to him to "sell" it. I was in high school in the 1960's, and every kid who approached driving age had to take two days off classes to watch the "scary" driver safety movies. The worst was "Signal 30", which apparently was a code sent out by the highway patrol if there was a bad accident. The girls left that movie in tears. It happened every time. There was lots of blood, death, and mayhem in Signal 30, but I'll tell you, that movie rattled around in my head for a long time. The filming didn't stop at the moment of impact. You saw the blood and guts while it was being cleaned up. (This safety movie is pristine compared to Signal 30). In my first years of driving, I saw some actual street scenes with blood, guts, unconscious people coming to, and even citizens getting out their garden hoses to clean up the aftermath. So....sound like a gen z kid if you want. Those movies accomplished their intended purpose.
I'm with the airlines. It's funny how we carry on many traditions of the railroads, from safety policies to even our union contracts. Yes, our rules are written in blood as well.
This is done in pilot training too. In the more formal programs, a lot of time is spent on reviewing actual incidents where people were injured or killed as lessons of how even the most attentive pilot can be killed by a single mistake and then failing to recognize and fix the mistake timely.
I like watching videos of old crossing safety movies, you get a glimpse of the state of crossing protection at that time. There's this one UP movie from the 40s where there's a crossing equipped with yellow flashers with STOP lights, that's cool. Then there's the one from 1959 with a crossing with crossbucks that look incorrectly installed.
Way cool I stumbled on your derail valley videos and found out you were an actual engineer that is so awesome and really enjoy all of your channels content keep it coming
So Is the story of Phineus Gage going to end up on citation needed. Also this was quite a good video, old safety videos are no bullshit
Everyone was harmed in the making of this video
Hyce there's some WWII training videos on TH-cam that i don't recall the exact search terms on but one or two covered sabotage of enemy rail assets. Fun part is watching all the WWII movie tropes get demolished by real world physics.
The hi rail trucks still have to check the train lineup so they can get on and off the track
You want to watch some the British Rail safety videos from the 70s like 'The finishing line'. They were absolutely brutal... and designed for children to watch.
The pyramid of piss cups in the back just complete the picture.
You made me stop breathing
Then add the ES&D boxcar and boom
Thanks go to Baconm13 who made the cups , sent them to me, and told me I should make the stack.
@@Hyce777 That guy has a hell of a sense of humor. Same as you for doing it.
dont get run over by the speeder or whatever you called it. love these videos, its interesting, also like watching military old safety vids
I'm 65. I watched SO MANY films in school with the voice of the narrator of that training video!
I recently saw the 1947 one from Great Northern, and it's amazing how much of those safety practices still shape up today (for the stuff that's still legal, anyway)
I laughed when he said " He didn't die"
23:48 I don't know why, but that was probably due to the entire Rio Grande L-105 class being labeled "bad luck" because one of them (3703) blew a boiler on 10/19/1952, and who wants to preserve a locomotive labeled as bad luck?
This Safety Video reminds me of the one me and my friends did for P.E In High School of the Do's and Not to Do's in the P.E Gym. The Teacher told us to use Our Imagination but make it look good. The Amount of Chaos that Ensue'd
i love the tower of pee cups you have in the background lol
Have you ever seen the PRR safety film, 'Escape from Limbo'? It's pretty much a Twilight Zone episode!
Surprised the narrator never said when you shake hands with danger
I have been working for a railway company for over 40 years and I remember films like this shown during every refresher or up skilling class that I had to do. Despite the way the narrator sounds it got the message across. Believe it or not most of what you see in this film is still applicable today. They sounded over the top but it was that aspect that helped you to remember it's content. Every day I came home safe and sound was in no small part to these films.
"Rules are written in blood" yes they are. On both sides of the pond, which is not surprising.
old saftey videos are by far one of the most entertaining types of videos on yt
Also, how about some ES&D Merch that Says "Safety First" on one the front and "We die like men" on the back.
That's a hilarious idea.
The football analogy was also used in a World War 2 "Know your Ally" series, in the first episode, about Britain. Same sort of message about teamwork. "We're in a different sort of game now. Only, this one isn't for fun; it's for keeps."