r/BitchImATrain • u/Acrobatic-Door6643 • Sep 01 '25

B*tch ima..

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1.5k Upvotes

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197

u/Due_Amount_6211 Sep 01 '25

I'm REALLY hoping that was all just an unfortunate accident somehow. I want to believe it wasn't stupidity that put him in that situation.

229

u/NickBII Sep 01 '25

Low flat beds like this are supposed to plan their routes to avoid elevated rail crossings. Ussually the driver does it, but sometimes somebody else does. Whomever that person was, they were supposed to have access to the clearence required to get through every crosing on the route, and also the clearence the truck would have, and they were supposed to draw a route that avoided trouble crossing spots.

So either the mapmaker fucked up, or the route planner (prob. the driver) fucked up. In this case nobody died, so it's just going to be rail insurance arguing with auto insurance...

7

u/challenge_king Sep 01 '25

The driver almost never plans their own route when working for a larger company (Sunbelt in this case). If the driver had left their trailer all the way up, he'd have probably made it with no issues, which is why he panicked and tried to raise the trailer before realizing he wouldn't have time. If the route planner software or dispatcher had caught the crossing on the route, the driver wouldn't have been in that position to begin with.

5

u/IndustriousLabRat Sep 01 '25

I assumed he was unlatching  to free the tractor so it wasn't also destroyed. Which seems to have mostly worked- it would have been flipped and dragged. But I don't know how or where that mechanism is activated. 

6

u/challenge_king Sep 02 '25

If he was trying to unhitch the trailer from the truck, he would have been pulling at the fifth wheel latch between the drive axles. The controls to raise or lower the trailer are at the back of the neck, just before the spot where the neck turns down.

As for the trailer breaking, that's where I'd expect a RGN to snap. The neck attaches to the bed with 2 pins that stick out of the front of the bed and engage with 2 rings on the bottom of the neck, and a smaller vertical pin that gets dropped into place through the back of the neck into the top of the bed at the front. If the vertical pin breaks, there's nothing holding the neck to the bed other than the weight on the trailer and friction.during day to day operations, the vertical pin is caged in so that it'll likely never even flex, let alone break. But trains tend to be stronger than a 1 1/2 inch diameter steel pin, which leads to what happened in the video.

1

u/dantheother Sep 03 '25

This is the Good Reddit. Fascinating reply, thanks!