Snow! Snow plows!
With all the snow we seem to have collected here in the true midwest - they brought out a few snow plows on the railroad.
When a rotary snowplow throws all that snow off the tracks and onto the farmer’s fields, does that become a problem for the farmers? They may have 12-25 inches of snow already and then the railroad piles some more on top of all that. Or is it a case of what’s one more inch or so?
^
In many cases, the ‘throw’ is adjusted to keep the snow on railroad property. If it does land on a fallow field, it doesn’t make much difference - a rotary spreads something like the output of a snow machine, not rock-hard soggy lumps like the stuff the county road plow leaves across your driveway. In many cases, it will be redistributed by the next passing breeze - hopefully, not back onto the tracks.
Note that wedge plows and spreaders DO plow up compacted chunks, but they don’t spread beyond the ends of the outspread wings.
Chuck
You must have seen the same spectacular pictures I saw!
I think you have the right idea with the “one more inch” theory. Keep in mind that this rotary plow isn’t really going through over-the-walkway snow all the way–in many cases it’s just a foot or less, blown out over about twenty feet of real estate.
What’s the farmer going to do before it all melts, anyway? I don’t think that he’ll find a particular ridge or snowbank that he’d be able to blend on the railroad.
Also, I suspect that most of the problems with really deep snow are found in terrain that probably isn’t the most conducive to good farming.
Of course, SJ, I’m not the farmer in the family! [;)]
Having someone in our family who lives in a snowbelt and whose farm borders tracks that get plowed out when drifts get around 12-15’ high—I can say----nah. Doesn’t do a dang thing.
What he’s more worried about is all the salt that gets used on the roads—then ends up in the drainage channels. It makes for its own “unique” challenges as it were—
The Driver (my husband) and I had quite a discussion on this. We were wondering about any cattle/animals that might get out and on the tracks.
2 things: it used to be many years ago that if you hit livestock, you let the powers that be know and then the railroad would buy the dead livestock. Do they still do that? and
2: if you have livestock on the tracks in front of the rotary - then what? You can’t very well pick them up and put them back over the fence and they can’t go down the track in front of the rotary cuz of the waiting snow. So how do they handle these problems?
The last time I talked to him about that type of issue he told me that neighbours down the road did get $$$ from CN at that time. But this does not always happen.
He’s always taken the cattle( such that he has) in the barns when it gets to deep anyhow. Neighbour? Meh—he’s only had that happen once when cattle got out that side----generally they end up in the bush!!
However, dear sister, if the rotary happens to hit a bird, you’ll wind up with shredded tweet!
Grooooaaaaannnnn!
Of course, with respect to bigger livestock, I have in mind a scene near the end of the movie Fargo. Bad ending for Steve Buscemi’s character there.
More like the scene in the 1969 James Bond movie with George Lazenby as Bond - On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, where the bad guy chasing Bond on skis comes to an untimely end when he drops off a snowbank in front of a snowblower in the Swiss Alps:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064757/quotes
Someplace I read that it’s not uncommon for the rotaries to encounter avalanches across the tracks, and that there can be a lot of debris in those - rocks, trees, elk, even mountain lions, etc. - enough so that a lot of hand work, or at least extgensive probing in advance, is needed to make sure that the rotary’s blades won’t be damaged by hitting something that hard or stiff and large and heavy while turning at high speed.
Doesn’t the rotary plow pick them up and put them back over the fence, (some re-assembly required)? [:-,]
Dear Murphy S:
I think your final statement will be destined for the annals of understatement![X-)][:-^]
Definitely a master of understatement he is—ahern—coff coff[:-,][:-^]
eeewwwww - question asked; question answered…
Thank you all.
In Lincoln, you are approximately on the 97th meridan. By the 100th (about Kearney) , you are in territory in which row crop farming is not feasible without supplemental water in one form or another. I suspect the farmers in your area welcome any additional moisture the railroad blows their way.
That is correct. This was such a problem that when it came time for CP to covert its’ rotary plows from steam to diesel power they choose not to do so. It always struck as ironic that the rotary plow was invented in Canada (by a dentist) and yet CP no longer has any.
Bruce
So THAT explains why the rotor in the patent application looked like a big dental burr!
The front-end rotor of the traditional rotary plow is actually rather fragile. Ramming it into tree stumps, rocks or any critter bigger than a chipmunk is almost guaranteed to do serious damage, if not render it unserviceable. The cross-auger type are somewhat more robust, but the design also keeps most oversize debris out of the moving machinery. And there are still times when the best way to clear the right-of-way is to call in the bulldozers.
Chuck
Thanks for the video, Jay! I’ve never experienced a rotary in action (only Russell wedge plows and Jordan spreaders), so that was an experience. I was shivering here in the computer room, just watching.
Dr. Eliot invented the rotary plow, but a fellow named Orange Jull took the good doctor’s concept and turned it into a working device. The Leslie brothers actually did the building and bought the patent from Jull. This design is the one in the video, and is what we generally think of when we talk about a “rotary plow.”
The Leslies eventually sold the rights to ALCO.
Jull still wanted a piece of the snow removal action, however, and, blocked from his original design, developed another rotary plow. This one featured a large cone mounted on an angle to the track and having fins along the cone to push the snow where they wanted it to go. It wasn’t particularly successful. I couldn’t find a picture on-line. It was a pretty fantastic looking machine.
Jay - I didn’t think anything good would come out of that snow storm - obviously I was wrong.