Snow train

February 5, 2015 • 7:09 am

If you live in the northern bits of North America now, you may wonder what happens to trains when there’s a lot of snow. Well, many are stopped, but some indefatigable trains plow on. Here’s one of them: a freight train identified as “CN train 406 West at Salisbury, NB [New Brunswick], February 3, 2015”. It’s Canadian, of course!

I’m surprised that they don’t have some kind of windshield wiper to clean the snow from the engine; at one point the train is chugging on when the engineer can’t see.

h/t: Matthew Cobb, from a tw**t by Space Shuttle commander Chris Hadfield.

47 thoughts on “Snow train”

    1. That was one of our short ones. You need a book for when you meet a long one at a crossing.

    1. I don’t think they do any more, in general. I believe they transfer crews at specific stops.

  6. They do have windshield wipers, but, just like those on cars, they cannot deal with lots of snow all at once. If you look carefully, there’s a space, all the way to the right side of the cab, where the engineer can see. If vision were completely obstructed, they would have to stop, but that can take a couple of miles to accomplish.

    Cabooses have not been routinely used on freight trains in many years. There is now a telemetry device attached to the rear of the train that allows the crew to monitor what used to be monitored from the caboose, and it allows the brakes to be applied from the rear of the train in the event of an emergency. That device is called an end of train device (EOT) or a rear end device (RED), or, euphemistically, a FRED, for Friendly Rear End Device.

  7. Freight train engines can be equipped with other methods for seeing through inclement weather. Here’s one such method gotten from a train aficionados’ chat board though it is for a steam engine :

    “Rather than windshield wipers a lot of engines were equipped with “clear vision windows”, which were sort of a glass awning in the windshield. There was an upper fixed glass pane, then the clear vision pane, which was hinged at the top, then a bottom fixed pane. The hinged pane could be closed or swung out and locked at any angle. The idea was to set the pane at an angle that would allow ample vision without getting too much rain or snow blowing in. If you look carefully at pictures of steam engines you can see them. They were also used on some gas-electric motor cars. Prime Manufacturing Company of Milwaukee made a lot of clear vision windows and other cab appliances for steam locomotives.”

    I remember my husband and I waiting for a freight train on the outskirts of Reno, Nevada to pass as we stood in disbelief as it just went on and on. It took fifteen minutes until it did! This one in the vid is a baby freight train. 🙂

  8. I think they have got windshield wipers, but you can see for yourself how much use they’d be in snow like that.

    GBJames – no they don’t have cabooses any more. They have an ‘End of Train Device’ that fits on the back end of the rear car and typically signals to the locomotive that all is well.

  9. Totally incredible! And I agree with PCC — no wipers for the windshield? The engineer was driving blind at that point, and those horns and clanging carried a slightly more urgent message — “Get outta my way, all you mofos! I’m a comin’ thru!!!”

    2. You don’t actually need to see ahead of you when driving a train, the signals tell you that the track ahead is clear and you go by that. We don’t slow down when it’s foggy (sometimes visibility is down to a couple of feet and you still go at line speed, 100mph on my line) and drivers of high speed trains (140mph & above) are taught to drive to their instruments (they actually practise with the front blind pulled right down so that they cannot see ahead at all), at the speed they go if they see an obstruction they will have hit it before they have a chance to react.

      2. This is, in fact, not all that different from the early days of railways, when train brakes were very sketchy, and (in Britain at least) locomotives were not fitted with headlights – no lights existed that were powerful enough to be of any use. But all lines were fully fenced so there should be no wandering stock, and the locomotive was far heavier than any road vehicle it might encounter.

        In the US, railroad tracks were more uneven, speeds were lower, brakes were better, lines weren’t fenced, so huge locomotive headlights were actually useful.

  10. Fitting that we have this great view at the crossing. Just a day or two ago the really bad train crossing accident up in New York with several dead. Cannot imagine what that woman was thinking but then we will never know.

  11. Hardy folk, Canadians! Here in the UK an inch or two of snow is sufficient to throw our infrastructure into chaos!

    1. Jonathan,

      Canada must have the right kind of snow!

      (For non-Brits, British Rail blamed train cancellations during winter on “the wrong kind of snow on the tracks”!)

      1. That train up in Canada is a straight diesel electric most likely. Most of your service in the UK is electric and much more affected by the weather. That’s logistics.

    2. This is a video of a train specifically set up to clear snow and a lot of it. It has a rotating wheel on the front that clears it out. Very impressive snow removal.

  16. I cringed as I saw the vehicles nonchalantly trying to “beat” the train- it’s very difficult to judge a train’s speed. The cameraman was taking a big risk, too: one football-sized chunk of ice could have done a lot of damage!

    1. That the train appears to be almost upon the cars is a distortion caused by using a big telephoto lens. The crossing bells and lights start when the train is getting close and give adequate warning time.

      Adds nicely to the drama though.

    1. That is, presumably, recently fallen powder snow. The loco weighs at least 100, and probably up to 180 tons. That’s 8 to 15 tons load on each wheel. And of course the wheels are very narrow compared with a road vehicle. So it’s capable of cutting through snow quite effectively.

      The other factor is that the front of the loco – even if it isn’t fitted with a small plow – will have a solid steel skirt extending down to a few inches above rail level – hence any tendency for the snow (or cows, or cars) to get under it and start to lift it is minimised.

  18. That was taken about 30 minutes from my home. The clanging is from the crossing not the train, and is automated once the train is close enough that traffic should stop. There are fewer freight trains here than there used to be but they tend to be much longer (and even fewer passenger trains).

    This one was short to average compared to some of the really long ones. As someone said above, you pop out a book or find something to do when you meet one of those.

    My father worked for the railway and loved to tell a story about a trip through Quebec where he rode up with the engineer and because the plow had gone through before them, the snow banks were up past the side windows on the locomotive and you could only see out the sides at crossings.

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