not that rare where i live. other then that, in the early 50s, the railroad over my hill, that gets more then enough snow to run them almost every year, which was the s.p. at the time, now since gobbled up by the u.p., converted them to electric with the traction motors out of an f9 b-unit, which it then attached with solid draw-bar, in place of the tender, to power them. also equipping the cab, with controls for the units that were then coupled on to push them.

there are always 4 or 5 of them, stationed here in roseville, where i live, and another 2 or 3 in sparks, which are moved up to truckee, when there is likely to be need of them.

(our "hill" being donner summit, elevation 7,010 feet)

yeah, but UP uses those snow spreaders more than any thing now.

this is true. the flangers come out first. then the wide wing spreaders, then the rotaries. if it doesn't get deep enough to need them between passes with the other equipment, that's fine, but i've seen 8 feet of new snow on the ground, in 8 hours over night, when i was living up on top. that's 8 feet of fall, drifts can MUCH more. as can avalanches. they use artilary cannong to knock down avalanch formations when there's nothing in the way, so they won't come down when anything is. not every year is that heavy, but snow is serious on donner. serious enough to build 50 miles of snow sheds. the wooden ones are gone now, and the cement ones are mostly only over where the switches are, but there's still quite a few miles of them. driving by on the freeway, if you look across to the other side of donner lake, way up on the side of the hill, you can still see the concrete snow sheds all along there.

I grew up in driving distance of the Mid-Continent Railway Museum, and my dad, a rail fan, often brought us by to wander the collections and occasionally ride the trains. One winter we went up when they had this beast out for the winter snow run: http://www.midcontinent.org/collect.....ce/osl762.html I remember that they'd left it idling (with a fence around it to keep stupid people from getting injured). We threw snowballs at the spinning blades and watched them eventually come flying out the chute. Good times!

its P-L-O-W in the US actually

I never seen a diesel like him before! Awsome!

It's actually a steamer.

Dang! It fooled me.

Yeah. I can see why. But it will never run again. The boiler is in such a bad shape it can't be fixed. So it's only gonna be restored for display purposes only.

Well, at least he's not gonna be, dare I say it, scraped. Ooo! I hate that word >M<

Looks almost like something out of a horror movie, a rusty locomotive that appears at night and rips things to sherds with its rusted maw of death, thank god they never had something like this in Thomas the Tanks Engine or it would of left a lot of child mentally scarred

yeah.... The closest thing they had to that was Diesel 10.

But he was a bit of a pansy to say the least, caught a special one day that showed him in it and he never talked and they even made him smile in it cause he help the Steam engines, way to ruin a supposed "evil" character.

Oh but he is evil in the new special "Day of the Diesels." Just the oily voice..... The sinister smile........ In that special he just oozes with evil. He does have a bit of a puss-out moment in it....... But he still oozes more evil then ever did before, none-the-less.

Meh, I caught the recent specials on Youtube (Day of the Diesels and Hero of the Rails) and whilst they were interesting I was just not impressed with them. I kinda like the idea of moving to CG considering that the later models episodes they were doing were pretty awful but the stories are just so weak and characters aren't what they used to be, Plus (not sure if you getting the versions voiced by Michael Angelis) but voice over for the show just sounds so half arsed. I'm probably just to much of a fan of the originals voiced by Ringo Star and the early Michael Angelis based of the original Railway series books.

(Also, why in the most recent ones have they forgotten that Henry doesn't need special coal anymore, that problem was sorted after he went to Crewe when he had his Flying Kipper accident)

I think they lost track of that fact about Henry's coal around season 6 or 7 of Thomas and Friends.

ROTARY!!!! :3
Man, I love those machines! Especially the old Steam ones! :3

There was a plow that once clear snow. But now.... it has grow anger and it will.... clear humans!!!!!!

THE CURE OF THE ROTARY SNOWPLOW!!!!!!!!!!!

such a beautiful device