at the end of that train car in the picture, you can see the rolled up roof of the train. this is after the train passed under the bridge, so it must have been sucked down under the bridge and scrapped the top of the cars
even in the video, there’s not nearly enough material at the edge of the bridge to account for multiple train cars worth of roofing. it’s just collecting a certain amount and the rest is passing, probably rolled upside down and under.
i wouldn’t have been brave enough to stand up on that bridge to film. idve expected some bits of metal exploding off with the force, or a weak bridge to collapse.
Trains have to run on a schedule. The route is scheduled far in advance, and they know the route it’s going to take. They should also know the clearance of all the bridges on that route, so that they know not to send something too large that way.
So either they didn’t check the height of those cars, or they didn’t check the bridge clearance on that route.
The person who filmed this should have hung over the left side of the bridge as the railcars emerged, filming down inside the cars to show us just how the automobiles were getting damaged. Because risking your life for that one shot is worth it!
The really awful part is, the first few seconds of the video clearly show the train several feet from the bridge, but moving forward with the roof of one rail car already ripped up. That means the engineer knew he had hit the bridge, stopped, backed up, and then took another run at it. He knowingly plowed into the bridge a second time. Please tell me the person or the people who decided that was a good idea are no longer in charge of moving trains.
Likely a long train with shorter cars in the lead. That would likely be a deceptively long haul over uneven ballast to catch up with the cab and hail the engineer.
Something seemed fishy when I first saw this elsewhere. The driver stopped, backed up a few meters, then staring forward again. Happily just as the footage starts. Then we see all the crushed cars. But:
the level of crushing is too deep for the lack of damage done to the sides of the train cars. The sides of the train cars are uncrumpled… if so, what damaged the cars, some of which are at least 1m below the level of the shearing. Without damaging the “walls” of the train car.
how do you crush that many cars with gathering up a lot of roof material at the shearing point.
in the first 2 seconds, there is a white car with a sunroof; it’s damaged at the rear, likely from the gathering up of the roof material. But the glass sunroof is a) clearly undamaged AND b) is at least 150mm below where the roof is shearing off. BUT the roof of that car has been “through the ringer” already.
And it’s filmed too well, reasonably steady, and not in portrait mode.
Something’s fishy here, folks.
