Jump to content

Height awareness


stevec176

Recommended Posts

I remember about 30 years ago landing at LeHarve with my first van abroad I went under the suterrain?, frightend me stiff when I realised that it was only for cars etc, I made it no problem but on the return I checked the height barrier notice as I went by on the normal road, it said 6.5 mt, my van was 6,9mt, how close was that to taking the roof off?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The Le Havre underpass was notorious, as the main route east from the ferry port suddenly dived underground and vehicles too high to use the underpass needed to move into an overground 'avoidance' lane well in advance.

I remember dire warnings about the Le Havre underpass being posted on early motorhome forums and - on the one occasion I drove east from the Le Havre port in a motorhome (2.75m height) in 2005 - making sure to avoid it.

It's mentioned in this 2015 Wildcamping forum thread

https://wildcamping.co.uk/threads/motorhome-stuck-in-tunnel-in-rouen.49641/

Same thing nearly happened to me on our first trip to France (probably around 1991) I had a Swift Kontiki, I also had a windsurf on the roof. We arrived at Le Havre & within about five minutes I came to an underpass at a junction & just carried straight on & heard a scraping after going about 50 metres into the tunnel. Luckily a French driver stopped at the entrance while I backed up. Just a bit of a scrape on the sailboard, might have just made it if we didn't have it on.

There seems to be no on-line mention of the underpass nowadays, so I'm guessing Le Havre's road system has been modified.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Many years ago the exit to a Sainsbury's was via a low bridge, noted in metres. We didn't know what the van height was in metres but we though we were under the quoted bridge height. With bated breath, we went under the bridge and came out unscathed. The car behind us waved us down and said we only had a couple of inches to spare. With bravado, I said "So what!" My misses said, "Never again".

Ever since, we have had a note in the cab giving the height and with width - including wing mirrors, and 'furniture' on the roof, at least six inches/centimetres to spare, and the tyre pressures. We've still had one incident where we approached a low bridge on the A137 @ Mannigtree with the earlier road-side signage hidden in foliage; we had to do a U-turn in busy traffic.

Comfort Insurance once told me in a telephone conversion that the most common  claims were for aerials and satellites knocked off the roof going through a low bridge.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...