Hooniverse Weekend Edition: The Gregson Street Railroad Trestle Bridge that Eats Trucks!
There is this spectacular website called 11foot8.com run by Jürgen Henn, and it is about the Gregson Street Railroad Trestle located in Durham, North Carolina. The clearance is only 11 ft, 8 inches, a height that most box type delivery trucks exceed. With so many trucks being decapitated by this railroad bridge, Jürgen thought it would be great to publish the carnage.
There are a lot more where that came from, so why not just go over to his site, and see them all.
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I know of a similar trestle on the west side of Seymour, Indiana. I spent a summer there in 1984 and saw a couple of trucks, including one hauling a large bulldozer on a lowbow, get wedged.
Uh, why don't they just replace the trestle with one that has a 15-16ft clearance? There used to be a similar (12ft 6in) trestle on Garland Road in Dallas, near White Rock Lake. It was a square U-channel style prefab trestle set on concrete pylons, erected in 1930. The track was abandoned 15 years ago, but the trestle stayed, opening up 18-wheelers on a regular basis. It was finally lifted off and taken down a couple of years ago, and was recently replaced with a pedestrian trail bridge having a 16ft clearance.
Here it is in Google Maps, before the pedestrian bridge went up:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&am…
It's not so easy if the railroad line is still active. Not only would you have to raise and replace the bridge, you'd have to regrade and replace several hundred feet of railroad on either side of the bridge, including the embankments underneath. Now you're getting into huge money and time. Reducing the steel underneath the bridge isn't really an option either. Those big I-beams are needed to carry the loads.
True. Another alternative is to build a new bridge on a different alignment (like alongside the old one). But even that would be tough with the Gregson St. trestle, as there are two parallel streets running along either side:
<a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Durham,+North+Gregson+Street,+NC&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=37.598824,80.332031&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=N+Gregson+St,+Durham,+North+Carolina&ll=35.998947,-78.910179&spn=0.001183,0.002452&t=h&z=19" target="_blank"> <a href="http://;http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&am…” target=”_blank”>;http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&am…
But a new alignment opens up a new can of worms. There's no way you can shift that bridge location without buying up a huge amount of commercial right-of-way. Also, you'd need extensive impact studies (sociological, business, traffic, noise, environmental, etc.) even before you get to the buying stage. It would be MUCH cheaper to regrade and rebuild the existing bridge. I know about this stuff – I'm an enviro engineer who has worked on numerous roadway and railway corridor studies.
What about digging down and lowering the road surface?
Not a bad idea, but you can't just put an abrupt dip in a roadway. You'd have to completely regrade and rebuild the intersections on both sides of the bridge, reinforce the bridge supports, and provide adequate drainage to prevent ponding. Plus I see several manholes within the streets, so you'd probably have to lower sewer and utility lines. That in itself is not easy if the sewer lines are gravity. Raising and rebuilding the track and the bridge is the easiest option, but you still need to find the money for it.
Actually, the cheapest option – also probably the most unpopular – would be to close off the Gregson St. underpass entirely and be done with it. That would force all the traffic to go one block over to Duke St. to cross the railroad. I'm sure the City and the locals would have some strong opinions about this, however.
There's an RR underpass right here in downtown Flagstaff, AZ that's 13'10" that grabs a perfectly legal 13'6" Truck every so often either because there's five inches of snow and ice on the road (they've installed in-pavement heaters to help with this), or when the weather's fine, it's because the dip is so severe that a really long tractor and a really long trailer with the trailer tandems moved all the way back is going up the hill (exit) and coming down the approach and at the same time.
Snow in arizona o.O
Uh, yeah. Flagstaff.
I drove OTR (Over-The-Road, meaning you just got dispatched to wherever the freight was moving) for many years, and people all over the country would ask, "You have the most f*&%d-up accent I have ever heard. Where the hell are you from?"
'I'm From Bisbee!", I would say with obvious pride, but met with a blank stare (and no self-respecting Bisbeean would ever utter the words "It's right next to Tombstone", which people from any corner of the entire world would instantly recognize), I would say, "Well now I live in Flagstaff."
It was almost universally responded by the phrase, "Eeeew, I hate that town!!"
Flagstaff, AZ, is at the top of the hill on Route 66 (now I-40), and they have a bad habit in Winter of letting people get all the way up here from either direction, but only closing the lanes out of town when the weather gets bad. "Too dangerous to go downhill!" All the Hotels/Motels have variable rates depending on the status of the freeway, and there are Gates that block off the on-ramps, but never on the exit-ramps. Utter Bull-Shit.
I drive a Snow-Plow for the City as a seasonal worker, and you can tell within minutes of when they close the Interstate. People everywhere and nowhere for me to push the snow, and everybody looking for a place to park.
Sorry about the grammar and what-not up there, completely and blissfully drunk.
There was also another in Dallas, on Greenville Avenue north of Meadow Road, with a 12ft clearance. Back in the '70s, a garbage truck hit the bridge, knocking off the body, which landed on a car behind it, killing a woman. That finally moved the city and the railroad to replace it with a 14ft 8in bridge.
Good GOD! I just referenced this very overpass just a bit ago on Facebook! I haven't seen that overpass in many years, and to see it on video brings back memories of when I used to visit family that lived in the Raleigh-Durham area. All the locals used to say that if you stood there long enough, you would see a van get scalped. I can't believe that they haven't done anything about it yet!
It's called "Topping The Truck", and it means you are going to go down and take a drug-test and then you are so fired.
A failed drug-test is a career-ending injury, and while your employer may hint that you might want to "study" for an upcoming not-very-random test, those post-accident ones really sneak up on you.
And way worse than it's step-sister, "Topping The Load" because that doesn't necessarily mean the Truck is ruined, and every Boss sometimes asks you to run a little over-height or over-weight, but it's usually consensual
I have a better idea, which is let's just allow the Durham police to revoke driver's licenses for stupidity! No one has to remember the height of their truck or do any mental math. They've got a height sensor that blinks and people are ignoring it. Maybe the blinking lights should be replaced by a sign that reads "Stop Now, You Idiot, or You'll Hit the Bridge." Anyone who still runs into the bridge after that also should be barred from reproducing.
A lot of those trucks looked like rentals. I'm kinda sympathetic to those drivers, since they're probably inexperienced with something of that size and unaware of just how tall it is. Also, they probably just bought it.
There are flashing lights and numerous signs.
If you hit this you are trying to not pay attention.
I totally drove past that intersection just after the Penske truck hit it. My wife and I were on our way to dinner and we had a good laugh at the truck stuck there.
So I'm driving a Big Truck all over the country and get dispatched to go into Mexico (and hurry back across The Line right quick!…. No Time for Taco's!) for a load right next to my hometown.
Dispatch uses some weird computer program to figure out which way to go to get every load, and while the Owner-Operators can choose to use this or not, Company Drivers must treat this as Gospel. Going "Out Of Route" is a firing offense, but I choose to ignore it this time, because this is my hood.
I'm cruising around in my old stomping grounds and come up to this RR bridge on the main highway that I must have been under twelve gazillion
times while growing up.
The skid-marks leading up to it give me pause, and I add a few of my own when I see the sign 12'6"! I squeak under it, standing on the running boards watching while the Truck idles it way through.
Hitting an Overpass is complete "Fail" (as witnessed above) but hitting one in your hometown while "Out Of Route" is something else entirely.
The nearest freeway underpass near my house has "NO TRUCKS IN U-TURN" signs leading up to it, but I still regularly see truck drivers that chose to ignore it. The height is OK for a bobtail, but a truck pulling a trailer will cause the trailer's left tires to run up on the curb, with this extra six inches typically causing the box to contact the freeway above it. Because this happens in a U-turn at low speeds, the damage isn't too bad, but by the time the truck gets stuck it is too far around the corner for the driver to see what he is backing up into (traffic with a 40mph posted speed limit), so they frequently wait for the cop to ticket them and stop traffic while they back out.
I'm sure the next time those drivers run through this side of town, they drive the extra 75 feet it takes to make two left turns.
When I was getting schoolin' in the Metro NYC area, I used to listen to 1010 WINS in the AM for the weekly WIN! Pawkway can opener traffic dam…