Re: [sasslife] Railyway Bridge BASE
A friend and I made a road trip to jump a new (to us) trestle this winter. It's a long trestle, and there's not a lot of room to get out of the way of a train, so we hung out for a while the night before to get an idea how often they came by. There was plenty of time between trains, so we stayed in town for the night, and returned to the trestle in the morning.
We waited at one end of the trestle for half an hour or so, with no sign of trains. This put a bit of a kink in our plan, actually, which was to head out onto the bridge immediately after one train went by, giving us maximum time before the next one showed up. But after a while, we got tired of waiting, and we hadn't heard anything, so we decided to go for it. We made it to the middle, I jumped, and my friend made like a bandit for the end of the trestle. The whole time while I hiked back up to the car, not a single train went by.
We were standing at the car, a couple hundred metres from the end of the trestle, putting gear away, when my friend pointed excitedly at the trestle. A spotter truck, which of course we hadn't heard, and hadn't even considered, was driving onto the trestle. By that point, we were well out of harm's way, but the lesson here is that even if you can't hear a train coming, that doesn't mean
nothing is coming.
Michael