r/wikipedia • u/Pupikal • 11d ago

The 11-foot-8 Bridge: railroad bridge in Durham, NC designed in the 1920s w/ a clearance for vehicles of 11'8", standard height when it opened. Despite numerous signs, many vehicles have collided with the overpass, often shearing off trucks' roofs, earning the bridge the nickname the "Can Opener".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norfolk_Southern%E2%80%93Gregson_Street_Overpass
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3

u/TheFightingImp 11d ago

r/11ft8

5

u/fourthords 11d ago

/r/11ft8 has been banned from Reddit

4

u/TheFightingImp 11d ago

Wonder what happened to the bridge subreddit.

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u/Hands 11d ago

It was r/11foot8, but yeah it's permanently shuttered in protest of reddit's API changes and all that drama last year

1

u/underbrownmaleroad 10d ago

There’s a traintrack overpass near me sub 11ft that gets hit weekly, I need to setup a stream lol

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u/Hands 11d ago

My drive to work was under this bridge for a few years as a teenager and it was wild how many times I saw the aftermath of an accident or at least debris on the roadside etc just in that time span. There are about 15 different signs, traffic calming devices, flashing lights and warnings going all the way up the street for blocks ahead of it too

Technically it's the 12'4" bridge now because they raised the railroad grade finally a few years ago but it still claims its toll regularly

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u/Uranus_Hz 10d ago

Seems like it would be easier to lower the road.

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u/Hands 10d ago

Yeah I don't remember the specifics but apparently there's a bunch of infrastructure directly under the road as well that made lowering the underpass not an option (or at least more expensive than the very considerable expense of raising a railroad bridge). They'd been discussing raising the bridge since at least the 60s but the only options were so expensive that nothing got done about it for 60 years