Strasburg Railroad, plowing snow.

Interesting video. Thanks for sharing.

Neat,, Yes we got some snow this year.. Never thoguth about Strasburg having to clear the tracks. Thanks for sharing..

Thanks for posting this video! That Russell Snow Plow is dang near identical to the Coudersport & Port Allegany Russell Snow Plow in the museum. Does anyone know the age of the Strasburg  plow?

It has been some time since Pennsylvania has seen serious winter.

Sure has been a serious winter here as well. I believe  all of the great lakes froze over. It doesn't happen that often. I enjoyed the video so thanks for posting... I did notice the crew had all the crossing  flanges cleared and the plow didn't have any wings  to push back the  banks.   I don't know about the Strasburg Plow but  some   CN plows were made in the 20s 30s.  Most   terminals  had  at least one along with a flanger

Mike, your snow plow video is a real beauty, did you race ahead after each shot or did you have help.  Also looks like some new good looking additions have been made on your modular layout at the home and garden show, great work guys.

Jack 

I always love the plow videos!  If the people who operate these things knew there are nuts like me in the world they would be laughing shaking their heads at the thought of people watching them on a video doing their miserable jobs!  What  a world huh?

Probably a "photo special", announced in advance, and the participants pay for the privilege. The steam locomotive & plow/freight or whatever, stops between "run-bys", and the supervisor on the ground has a radio, and informs the Engineer when the paying participants are all set-up, then the train proceeds towards the photo line.

Not exactly.  The video was shot in February 2010.  If you know who you are looking at, you can see me in the first shot.  If you notice, the 475 is lettered N&W for the Pete Lerro photo charter the next day.

The snow was 2 days before (snow on Wednesday, and the plow ran Friday).  It was common knowledge, at least for those who had paid for the Saturday photo charter, that the plow would run Thursday or Friday.  As it was, it took all day Thursday to clear out the station area, parking lot, and the yard tracks--which was done with a diesel.  The plowing of the line started Friday morning, and took pretty much the entire day.  The sun was very low in the sky and setting by the time the 475 returned to Strasburg.

With the amount of snow on the line, staying ahead of the plow wasn't that difficult.  It was NOT coordinated for photography however.  If you were there, you were on your own.  The roads had been scraped, leaving huge mounds at the crossings.  A crew was running ahead digging out the crossings, but with the amount of snow out there, it usually took about 2-3 passes per crossing to make sure everything was clear.

btw, for what it's worth, as expected, the charter ran under cloudy skies, even though Thursday and Friday were sunny throughout.  Always seems to happen that way, doesn't it?!?

Kevin

Strasburg had to run the plow again this year due to the heavy snow.  They start running trains in late January or early February I believe, so they actually had a purpose to use the plow.  I don't know about the video from 2010, but this year they had to plow specifically to run photo trains the next day during their opening weekend.

Since the Strasburg Rail Road has freight business, I bet they operate whatever equipment is necessary, whenever it is necessary, in order to keep their line open all year.

Pennsylvania, (Pittsburgh), gets, maybe, 120 days of Sunshine a year.  Philly/Harrisburg area not a whole lot more.  1 day in 3 is sunshine, but Pennsylvania is green, most of the time, comes with the rain/snow.   Interesting winter this year not seen since the early 90's.  We still talk about the blizzard of 93. 

Nice videos, Mike.  It's great that you were able to get over there and shoot their efforts.  Pretty rare stuff and a nice job recording the action.

Paul Fischer

Wow, that video has over 1,700,000 views. 

Neat Movie but the locomotive is the N&W 4-8-0 not the 2-10-0 from Great Western.

Joe

Very well done video, the sound is very good.

Thank you for sharing.

Bob 

Not my video.  My daughter-in-law forward-ed the link. 

Mike CT

Fun to watch, even though I don't like reminders of this thoroughly miserable and overly long winter.

Thanks for sharing the video!

Allan:  Did you happen to catch the special on TV Saturday night on the Alaska Railroad?  There were three hours on NGEO or one of the special channels.  Those guys that work on that RR go through some horrendous winter work keeping that line open.  It was one of those "reality TV programs" that you know was scripted for television, but nonetheless it made for entertaining television.  Certainly better than most of the crap that's on TV.

Paul Fischer

Does anyone know the age of the Strasburg  plow?

It was built circa 1902 according to the Strasburg equipment roster.

We have never run a photographer’s special snow plow run, and they are not done for fun.  The line is kept open due to our needing to run freight trains four days per week. 

I was the pilot in the plow for the run in the video, and as I recall we left Strasburg about 9:30 am, and worked without a break until we arrived at Leaman Place (about 4 miles away) around 3:45 pm.  Easy enough for the photographers to get ahead of us, what with time lost shoveling snow off the plow in front of the cupola so I could see where we were going, and time lost rerailing the plow.

2010 was a very snowy winter, and a lot of plow trains were run.  After another storm, we started to open the line on Monday morning, and didn’t reach LP until Thursday evening.  At one point, #475 was stuck in the snow at about the same spot as the photo above for over four hours, and it looked like she was going to spend the night there before hours of shoveling and burning rails broke her loose and she was able to return to Strasburg about 8:00 pm.

In this shot, the plow is derailed in about eight feet of snow, and the crew is having to dig terraced trenches along each side of it so they can place rerailing frogs.

The Rail Road’s east-west orientation with numerous cuts makes is very susceptible to being blown shut by the hard north winds that often accompany heavy snow storms here.  I have plowed snow that was even with #90’s arm rests.  Linn has plowed snow here that was even with the top of #90’s cab windows.

Loved the video. With being only 45 min. away I noticed alot of places I  reconizied. Thanks for posting the video.

David