Click on the pictures above for a closer look!
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Railways have always been challenged with winter snowstorms. Today, you often find snow plow blades mounted on the front of today’s locomotives to allow a train to clear the tracks ahead of it when the amounts of snow on the rails are modest. In two of the pictures at the above left, we find Ontario Southland Railway (OSR) locomotives, #180 and #181, which are ex-CP RS18u engines, equipped with such snowplows.
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If the snow on the tracks is deeper than a foot or two, railways will often bring in their classic wedge plows such as the plow in the picture at the above right which is part of the collection at the Revelstoke Railway Museum. In the video below by Walter Pfefferle, we find the OSR using their GP7 #378 and RS23a #503 and a plow borrowed from CP. They used this train yesterday on December 17th, 2010 to to plow the railway from Ingersoll to St Thomas.

As described on their website: “The Ontario Southland Railway is a 100 % Canadian owned short line railway company incorporated in 1992 to provide a number of transportation services to meet customer needs. On December 14th, 2009 the OSR took over the 32 miles of the St. Thomas sub from Canadian Pacific. OSR now has operations in Guelph, Tillsonburg and Woodstock to St Thomas. The OSR provides railway contract operations including complete maintenance, locomotives and related equipment. …..”
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For more about the Ontario Southland Railway, click here to visit their website where they provide much of interest to the rail enthusiast including a roster of their locomotives and a number of pictures as well. Also, click here for some great images of the plow in action also taken by Walter Pfefferle!
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Posting by Russ Milland; Pictures and videos by Russ Milland, Walter Pfefferle and from the OSR website.
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Click on the video below to watch it!
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