Just saw it on the History Channel. From the 7 feet of snow they got from this blizzard they were running out of places to put the snow so they shipped it south in rail cars to melt. Sounds odd, but did they really just keep the snow in the cars until they melted south where it was warmer? Seeing a line of sitting hopper cars with water draining out the bottom like a waterfall would be odd.
Did the show mention that due to a cold snap in the southern regions of the country, the snow didn’t melt as planned? The railroad ended up with a bunch of full hoppers that needed to be loaded…
The best laid plans…
I seem to recall back in '78 in Chicago when we lived here then we had over 100 inches of snow in the area and salt for the streets was brought into the area in rail gons and they packed the returning gons with snow so it could melt on the way south where they were filled with salt again and brought north for more street snow melting. Wow, that was by far the worst winter I can remember.
That winter there was a track full of snow-filled gondolas in Conrail’s Bayview Yard (Baltimore MD). Supposedly they came from Buffalo to melt, but after a month or so they hadn’t melted, so they were sent someplace else. Guess Baltimore wasn’t far enough south.
This year, Baltimore is probably looking for hopper cars to load and send to Buffalo!!
They could use that snow in the south/central Adirondacks, where dog sled races were cancelled due to insufficient snow…
Why didn’t the powers that be in the Central Adirondacks contact their counterparts in the Washington, DC-Baltimore area? They would have gladly given them all the snow they could use.
Not all of the snow that year was shipped by rail south from Buffalo. Toronto sent two of there snow melters to Buffalo with the crews to operate the machines. They literally picked up the snow melted it and then sent it as hot water back into the storm drains. I understand a Toronto Public Works employee invented these machines and this was there first use in the US. If I am not mistaken Buffalo and sevearl other US cities purchased these machines after seeing what they did in Buffalo that year.
Al - in - Stockton
If I remember right, O’Hare International has a few of these snow melters.
I have heard that the same thing was done in Chicago during WWII.
Query: Does Amrak rotate any of their equipment to thaw out during the winter? Not the corridor trains like, say, the *Hiawathas-*but possibly taking an ice covered Empire Builder and swapping that with a warm and dry Southwest Chief or (in the east) switching some equipment between the Lake Shore and the Silver Star.
The winters of '77-'78 and '78-'79 were very cold and snowy one for the United States east of the Rocky Mountains. Lake Michigan froze over both years (BTW-officially, according to NOAA, “freeze-over” indicates at least 90% of the surface water is frozen).
Carl might remember this–Proviso filled up many gons with snow from the yard and sent them south to melt. In 1978, from January 25-27, 12.4" of snow fell; the a few day later, February 6-7, 10.3" fell. This were just the ‘big’ snows. These were in addition to the normal snowfalls that are seen each year.
On January 13, 1979, 16.5" of snow fell. I was not near Chicago back in 1963 when they had 23" of snow on January 26-27. But I do remember that this storm changed the course of Chicago’s political ‘climate’ (pun intended).
…Anyone who was around this area in '77 - '78 will remember that winter…Terrible. My employer was shut down for the first time, I believe it was something like 60 years…And we were marooned here in our addition {outside of Muncie}, for about 5 days, and the extreme comments could go on and on…
But I recall a nasty winter {1958}, in terms of snowfall back a bit further…over in our home land in Somerset Co., Penna., we recorded 188" of snow that season…! All kinds of extremes were put to use to try to get society dug out and it took a while. In my lifetime, and I’ve been here a while, I believe that is the most Winter extremes I have seen…
IIRC, there was another problem ongoing when the blizzard hit - something about natural gas. Some industries were shutting down for that reason even before the bad weather hit.
Watertown, NY actually got more snow than Buffalo, but in those days, before the 'Net, the Watertown TV station couldn’t get any video (read, film) out to anyone. The roads were all closed and nothing was flying.
The story goes that a network type was on the phone with a local news manager. The network type was adamant that the local station send film so they could get it on the air.
“We simply can’t,” the local type told the network hack.
“I’m looking at a map, and I see an airport right there next to town,” retorted the network type.
“All of the roads are closed and impassable, and even if we could get to the airport, it’s closed…”
I remember being to the studios and transmitter of that Watertown station in the mid 60’s…it was actually on a hill between Watertown and Carthage. Back in those days you were confined to these locations often for days when snow or other weather “happened”. Sometimes job schedule and location assignments were done by days rather than hours!.
Dec '77 up here gave us two neat surprises. The first surprise was a 24" snowsquall that happened overnight and was then capped off by the second surprise which was another 26" of snow on top! Then, in January ‘78 we had a couple of blizzards that showed up dumping another 3’ of snow out of the first one and about 16" in the next----I remember Paymaster front end loaders dumping all kinds of snow into gondolas at the CN ‘raceway’ here in London ON.
To get into buses here we ‘fell’ into them as the snowpiles got so deep that the doors on the buses would open up and you could literally step into them without climbing any stairs.