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Continuing our reporting on the topic of the railways dealing with the challenges of plowing snow from their tracks, the video above captures an Ontario Northland train using a locomotive mounted plow to blast through a five foot snow drift. Note that the engineer blasts the air horn all the way through the drift to prevent it from being plugged up.
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What do railways do when the drifts are even higher? They turn to a Canadian invention, the Rotary Snowplow. The rotary was invented by Canadian dentist J.W. Elliot in 1869, but a prototype wasn’t built until the Leslie Brothers constructed one in 1883. For more information on the Rotary plow, visit Wikipedia’s article on the rotary by clicking here.
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Below we see two steam locomotives pushing a steam driven rotary. This action was captured on video a few years ago on the famed Cumbres & Toltec narrow gauge tourist railway in Colorado.
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Posting by Russ Milland
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