This frightening collision and massive explosion isn’t a behind-the-scenes look of a new action film. It’s the result of a crash between a passenger train and a truck stuck on a railroad crossing in Indonesia. Miraculously, there were no deaths and in fact, a local report states there was just a single injury in all of this.
The crash occurred on July 18 in the city of Semarang, the capital of Central Java between Surabaya and Jakarta. Detik.com reports a truck was stuck on a crossing when the train came along. Attempts had been made to get the truck clear, so the driver obviously wasn’t in the rig at the time of the collision. However, to make a bad situation even worse, the crossing was just before the Jalen Madukoro Bridge.
A video shared on Reddit shows the truck surviving the initial impact, and by surviving, we mean not erupting into a fireball. That happens as the truck is shoved into the steel beams of the bridge, and it’s quite dramatic to say the least. The train comes to a halt shortly thereafter, still apparently on the bridge though the report says the locomotive was hanging over the river.
The condition of the bridge is unknown. but it’s safe to assume the truck is pretty much done for. As for the one reported injury, that person’s condition is also unknown, though the injury reportedly happened after jumping from the train into the river. As of our report on July 18, a cleanup effort was underway to get the train cars cleared from the area.
This certainly isn’t the first time we’ve seen trucks hung up on railroad crossings. In March 2023 a truck hauling an excavator in Georgia got caught on a crossing with a slight incline. The driver appeared to disconnect the trailer from the rig seconds before the impact, but it still shoved the trailer and the massive excavator to the side like they were paperweights. Something similar occurred in Tennessee in December 2021 involving a truck towing a large concrete beam. Another truck’s cargo was smashed to bits in Texas last August.
No serious injuries resulted from any of these catastrophic collisions.