Rail transport is nothing new in the US. It played a major role in the country's industrialization starting in the 1800s, proving so reliable and cost-effective that it's still in use today. In all that time, numerous sophisticated - often high-tech - systems have been devised to insure that no matter the landscape, goods transported by rail make it from Point A to Point B without a hitch.

Yet despite all this, the occasional hiccup does occur. Like earlier this month, when a train car full of brand new Ford vehicles - notably, at least several Ford Explorers and Lincoln Nautiluses (Nautili?) - made contact with a low-hanging bridge, sustaining an ungodly amount of damage.

The incident happened in Memphis, Tennessee on September 13, and as you can see, the bridge effectively peeled the train car's roof off like it was a can of tuna. But it's not the corrugated metal roof of the train that we're worried about here; that seems like it would be comparatively easy to replace.

More rather, it's the vehicles inside the transport that have us concerned. According to the poster of this video, the bridge did some $2-million worth of damage, and from the looks of it, most of that burden was probably borne by the cargo.

Beside being an unremitting horror show of vehicular carnage, this video is a timely reminder of just how long it takes a train to stop; even a slow-moving train has a lot of momentum, due to its mass, and it takes a long, sustained effort to slow it to a stop.

This accident is one of the more bizarre, unexpected ones we've seen, although it's perhaps not as strange as that one time, back in 2018, when a cow broke into a Mazda dealership in Scotland and did some $2,000-worth of damage.

The 2020 Ford Explorer starts at $32,765, and the Lincoln Nautilus at $41,040, at which prices it would take several dozen vehicles to total $2 million in damages. Pour one out for the brand new Fords that will never have their time in the sun.