Snow on Donner / Pictures

Trains Magazine General Discussion
1

Several of us made a trip to Donner over the weekend of the 29th and 30th to get pictures of the operation in the snow. I hope you enjoy the scenes. New snow fell on Saturday night and added 16" of new snow made for great scenes on Sunday…

CZ

http://s806.photobucket.com/albums/yy345/Trainsforyou/Winter%20on%20Donner/?albumview=slideshow

2

Very NIce Photos! [bow]

Thanks for sharing them,Here!

3

I wonder if the snow will pile up in the Sierras this winter to the point that UP has to bring out the Rotary Plows…

4

You sure that isn’t a picture from teh Midwest right now. LOL heck right now on the Transcon the BNSF will be bucking 4 foot Drifts at every Grade crossing or better.

5

Glad to share photos with our forum.

The snow is very nice but not even close to the amount needed for any Rotary use. We have a ten foot plus base on the ski mountains but only about 5 foot base at Soda Springs. The railroad really knows how to fight snow with the flangers and spreaders until a four or five foot snow comes down in one or two days, which causes snow slides on the track. At that point, they use snow cats for local slides and they call out the rotaries for deep snow to clear the track.

CZ

6

Good one! I was raised in Illinois and never noticed any large pine trees like we have in the Sierra mountains. The nice thing about California is, I go sixty miles east into the mountains for snow and return home back to the foothills where the temperatures are in the sixties today. I hope someone gets some good pictures of the midwest snow since it is rare to be that deep.

CZ

7

We are hoping, but the rotaries have been on the Hill working for fifteen years. The picture below shows one of the units being checked out recently but it did not get used. The Union Pacific has three units that are active and two for parts in Roseville. I got to see them fired up twice this year for checkout and they still have steam whistles on the rotary, but are powered by diesel power from the F7B unit. The steam generator is used to deice the blades and some of equipment.

One unit being tested last year.

8

Nice shots, thanks for sharing them!