6/27/2023 0 Comments Chicago low underpass street map![]() (very expensive) For instance, the height standard for Interstate highways (which were supposed to clear any road legal vehicle) was lower in the 1960's than today. Most of the low underpasses were built many years ago and have not been replaced or upgraded. The force of the downward impact was enough to break the trailer in half and dump many, many, many, small plastic moldings all over the local landscape. He wedged that sucker under the bridge about 2/3’s of the way back. ![]() What he didn’t realize on his last day on the job is that a 53” 13’6” trailer with the trailer tandems (wheelset) placed all the way to the rear would clear the bridge, all right – but that the middle of the trailer would rise as the tractor and trailer pulled through the sag under the bridge. My driver just knew that a 13’6 would clear the B&O underpass – which was true for the 28’ “pup” trailer normally assigned to this run. One day, we had a foreign-line trailer 53' assigned to the local run that went in that direction due to a "headload" of non-palletized boxes that we were spotting at a customer’s facility for them to unload. This was about the time that 53-foot long highway trailer were just coming into widespread use - we had only 45' and 48' long equipment in the mid 1980's. Nevertheless, our routing instructions were to go around the underpass. My old-head drivers all told me that "everyone knew" that a 13'6" would clear that bridge. There's a 13'5" underpass on US62/3 under the ex-B&O/CSX Columbus/Cincinnati line just southwest of Columbus. "Yeah, boss - but I was driving a flatbed back then!"Įven "aware" truck drivers can get caught out. ![]() ![]() "Tony, didn't you tell me you'd been down there once a month for years when I gave you that load?" I still had a guy try to take one under a 12'0" bridge in Louisville, KY - with a load of powered red food dye in fiberboard bulk containers on a windy, rainy day, it looked like a scene from a bad Zombie Apocolypse movie. You can never be too careful - the trucking company for which I worked into the mid-1990's still took time to put "reverse font" warning labels visable in the driver's rearview mirrors on our standard 13'6" highway trailers. Yes - they converted a few boxes into "open tops" before they lowered the tracks under the bridge (which involved moving buried communication lines and city water/sanitary lines). The eastbound intermodals that originated here had to be loaded accordingly, or the train would have take a sixty-mile detour to the northwest on the old NYC Columbus-Toledo/Detroit Scottslawn Secondary and hit the St Louis-Cleveland line at Ridgeway, Ohio before turning east (the usual routing via the old NYC Big Four line to Cleveland intersects it at Galion, OH). As an example, CR/CSX used to have a overhead bridge in downtown Columbus that could handle double-stacked ocean cans or a domestic/ocean set, but not a set of two domestics. While it's less of a problem now, in years past quite a few rail lines could not clear double-stacked domestic boxes. It's not just the draymen that have to worry - the lift jockeys in container yards have to pay attention to clearance restrictions. "Domestic Containers" (such as the Hub Group, J B Hunt and Schnieder boxes) intended for use in the US are about 12" taller than standard international containers in order to keep them competive with over-the-road trailers.
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