We’ve all done it. When you’re watching a horror film and the characters freeze with fear at the sight of the masked killer/evil leprechaun/whatever it may be, you think “If I was in that situation, I would just get the hell out of there.” Well, the truth is we can’t really know how we’d react in a life-threatening situation until we’re living through one.
That said, most of us can probably agree that if we were parked on a railroad track and a train was hurtling towards us at devastating speed we would probably decide to scooch out the way.
However, this Texan man with a serious lack of self-preservation instincts is not like other people, apparently, as he decided it was A-OK to casually keep his truck parked directly in the path of a high-speed train, despite its horn being loud and alarming enough to wake the dead. In a nail-biting 28-second video posted to TikTok by user @matthewwhixson — who is based in Fort Worth, TX — the guy in the truck leaves it until the very last second to drive off the tracks. It’s just enough to save his life, and that of his truck, but his trailer is utterly smashed into scrap as the train plows right through it.
Thankfully no lives were lost due to this dunce of a driver’s stupidity, so Matthew could see the funny side in his caption. “Don’t be like this guy,” he wrote, with a crying laughter emoji.
Those in the comments are having a hard time wrapping their minds around the ever-deepening layers of stupidity that this man is guilty of. For starters, why did he even decide to stop there in the first place? “Never stop on tracks, even if a train isn’t coming,” one user warned with some sage advice. “You never know…” Then there’s the fact that he elected to do absolutely nothing while waiting for the person in front of him to move. “He had so much time and options,” one bemoaned, while another offered, “Why didn’t he cut to the right and just go over some cones?”
Others, meanwhile, are happy to take over where the train failed and tear this witless wonder apart. “I mean he didn’t know. They should put up like signs and big flashing lights to warn people,” one roasted. “Magic trick. trailer here. trailer gone,” someone else joked. But, hey, let’s look on the plus side for a minute here: “Well, at least he still has his truck.”
This man might not have paid for his reckless railroad behavior with this life, but rest assured he’s definitely going to pay for it out of his own wallet. “That’s a 30k or 40k machine on the trailer definitely destroyed plus the trailer and the damage to the train damn that guy gonna be in some serious debt,” someone pointed out, to which Matthew replied, “Yeah, the guy is toast.”
Although the majority aren’t as dense as this particular driver, railway crossing accidents are tragically common — so much so that some places in the world are taking preventative measures to the next level. Norway, for instance, suffers from 700 such incidents per year so is pioneering a new kind of AI traffic camera to stop them from happening. When human beings are acting as dumb as this guy, maybe it’s for the best if the machines take over, after all.