runaway train...and never coming back

It's always fun to drive in Belgium. The traffic and driving culture is something spectacular to any other western European one, but once you get into it, it's kind of enjoyable. It feels like they left a bit more responsibility for the driver (to cope). One thing that stop me this time, that I have never seen anywhere else, was the runaway-track, supposedly meant for the trucks. Here's a snapshot from google earth.

The road is E42 highway passing by Verviers, and - coming from south - it's a gentle but rather long downward slope, which leads you to a steeply curved bridge over the city. As we were driving along the sign "runaway track" caught my attention - first because it was in english among all the rest in french, and two because i'm used to having exit's or ausfarts (in germany) from highways, but "a runaway track" sounds like something more than that.

Besides having the 90's legend "Runaway Train" from Soul Asylum ringing in my head for the rest of the week, I had a moment of silence for all the truck drivers that has had to use that track. As the picture tells, it's about a truck broad, a half truck deep, 25meter long chute, designed to stop a truck - for good. Probably to let some truck drivers out alive, the bottom end was packed with something that looked like a mattresses at sport fields.

10 points for the engineers who designed it, because it has probably saved the lives of the few who've come out of it alive... although, I doubt if the following curvy bridge would have passed the safety committees in any other country - when afterall, it's so difficult to drive that some will need to escape from it the last minute.

a minute of silence for the sake of all the truck drivers' widows.