Watch Out!

 Let's say you are driving a big truck, and let's say you know, or you should know, that the height of your truck is more than 11 feet 8 inches. (That's 140 inches, or 3.555 meters for our international friends). 

The long and short of it, shall we say, is that you should not try to drive a 12' truck into an 11' 8" opening, any more than you can put 10 lbs of sugar in a 5-lb bag.

But, down in Durham, North Carolina, there is, along the roadway, a railroad crossover officially known as the Norfolk Southern–Gregson Street Overpass. Aggrieved truck drivers and local wags call it “The Can Opener” for all the truck lids it has removed, like so many cans of tuna.

 The Gregson Street Guillotine, as others call it, was designed in the 1920s and finally constructed in 1940, back in the days before cars were "12 yards long, 2 lanes wide, 65 tons of American Pride!". Since your great grandpa came to take g-grandma to the football game in a Stutz Bearcat, cars have become a great deal longer, wider, and taller. And, heaven knows, louder.  

But the bridge has a job, a passage for passenger and freight trains into downtown Durham. And you would think that the men and women piloting those land barges through North Carolina would read the sign and heed the warnings, but the proof that this does not happen is available for home viewing.

A man named Jürgen Henn, who works in an office near the scene, put cameras up to record the collisions. As of last month, there have been 173, and you can go to his YouTube to see them or show them to your friends attending truck driving school. 

So even when NetFlix and Hulu and WhatHaveYou have no new videos or movies to show you, you can always see an array of roof-rippers and stack-strippers from the comfort of your phone.