Via the Borderline Boys, a little film:
My grandfather was a welder who ran a service station for long-haul truckers. One of them made a similar mistake. In those days long-distance communication was often by telegraph, which charged by the word and therefore rewarded brevity. He sent his letter of resignation in the form of a quatrain:
Saw low bridge,
Couldn't stop.
Now you have
An open-top.
9 comments:
Duck!
...Duck! Goose!
I wonder if the resignation notice was inspired by the Burma Shave roadside ads.
There were a fair number of rental trucks -probably driven by people who do not drive trucks for a living- involved in the accidents.
Scotch Road in my town runs beneath a Conrail overpass -- clearance is a nominal 12'1", but that's measured from the low point in the dip. Overlength trailers get stuck when the truck starts climbing the upslope before the rig's rear wheels reach the bottom (draw a U with a horizontal line through it to get the idea).
One year, NJDOT repaved Scotch Road and didn't grind the old surface down -- the extra inch of asphalt on the road insured that anything that wasn't an auto got stuck beneath the underpass...
I have a lot of respect for the structural engineers and craftsmen who built that span. The height may be a bit awkward, but it's taking a lot of abuse that it wasn't specifically designed for and it appears to be standing tall. Good on them.
William sends.
...Duck! Goose!
Is that still played? That does take me back!
Dad used to relate the story of a trucker they used, he made a detour off the approved route so he could spend the night with his girlfriend.
He had two JT9D jet engines on the trailer........ouch. I think they were somewhere north of 1.5 million apiece.
I always give truckers plenty of room. You never know what they are hauling. The pressure bottle repair place next door gets deliveries once a week from a seriously big truck filled with lots of empty pressure tanks. If I remember correctly he said the weight of his rigged fulled loaded is somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 pounds. I asked him, "Do people cut you off on the freeway at 60 mph while driving small, squishable compacts?" And he said, "All the time" with a wry smile. So far, he has been able to adjust for their lack of common sense.
Yeah, I ride a motorcycle everywhere. Bikers and truckers seem to get along very well, and I suspect it's largely because bikers understand the math! You get behind the glass, even in a compact, and you have this sense of being protected from the world outside -- like you're watching it at a zoo or in a fishbowl. That's one real advantage to the motorcycle. You know where you are.
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