level crossing train crash

[schmidty]

Originally Posted by LindsayGT

1. More lights further back.

2. Create a bend in the road so that trucks are forced to drop back to say 60km/h. Quite easy to do but much more costly than boom gates.

Long straight roads only encourage the "cowboy" truckies to try and race the trains. The professional drivers would never do this.

Get a grip.

Long straight roads and cow boy truckies? Eff off. Yesterday i had to go to Robinvale. Had to go the back way straight up the calder and turn off just out of sea lake and across through manangatang. On that road, you'd be doing 100kmh, come around a bend in the road and literally have 100m warning of a totally unprotected rail crossing. Barely enough time to pull up, and no vision of the line due to trees and scrub. Approaching the tracks you'd be lucky to see 50m of track either side of the road. Now how the hell do you pull up 62 tonnes of B double when you dont even get enough warning that there is a crossing coming up. And we also rely so much on crossing signals working properly. On the way home i had to stop off just outside swan hill so had to come back the Murray Valley Highway. The rail crossing as you come into swan hill, is at an offset angle to the road, and with houses, factories, trees etc leading up the the crossing, you cant look ahead, and you cant see it out your left side without climbing into the passenger seat. If a car driver cuts it fine on train tracks due to not being able to see, driver error or signals not working, you've got about 5m of metal to drag across the crossing. Do it in a double, and there's up to 26m to get over.

$440,000 to upgrade a crossing to install boom gates. Done and road works lately? I dont think you'd have any change left over from the same wad of cash if you had to rip up and lay another 1km of highway either side of the crossing. They have done this between i think Wagga and cootmundra. The road crosses the same train line quite a few times, and runs fairly parralell, so they set it up so you're crossing it at 90 degrees to the tracks and you've gotta slow right down. Works well.

If you wish to start or keep branding truckies as cow boys, get your bum in 1 for a day and see what its really like, and what we have to deal with. Most of the truck drivers that give you the grief are the ones that never get out of the city. But its only a few that wreck it for all of us.

I'm not about to start racing trains mate. Nor do i wear a cow boy hat. We get hassled enough on the roads, and the new breed of drivers who think they are doing the world a favour by hassling truck drivers needs to change. I pulled out to overtake a car yesterday that had been doing 90 for about 15km. Pulled out, and he decided that he wasnt going to let me past. So after about 4km on the wrong side of the road and about 1km from the end of the straight, with him sitting next to my rear trailer axles, i put my indicator on hoping he'd finally let me in. Took him about 10 - 15 secs to let me back in. withing 3 minutes he was a dot in my mirror again as he has slowed back down to his 90kmh. Lucky we dont base our opinions of all car drivers on a dangerour few, just like its about time you stopped basing your opinions of all truck drivers on a dangerous few.