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It’s December, and maybe you’re dreaming of a white Christmas. But you probably don’t want that seasonal snow and ice to be settling all over the railway tracks.
Snowy and poor cold weather conditions have been something that trains and railways have had to contend with right from their infancy. Before the railways, heavy snowfall would be dealt with by rolling the snow to compact it into a flat surface for travel by horse, cart and foot. When the railways came, manual work with shovels was relied on at first to attempt to clear the tracks of any snow.
Later in the 1800s, railway companies started using snowploughs. Charles Lowbaert patented the wedge plough in 1840. This was exactly what it sounds like – a wedge fitted to the front of the train to push snow and ice out of the way. It was sometimes called a ‘bucker plow’. In countries such as Canada and the US where snow fell heavy and fast during the winter, the snowplough was a very necessary device to keeping the railways moving.
Needless to say, here in the UK snow was also a problem. A pamphlet about the North Eastern Railway that the IMechE holds in its collection notes an incident that happened in 1886 where a “severe snowstorm blocked the main line north of Newcastle and rail traffic was brought to a standstill”. Such was the snowstorm that one train only reached its destination some 12 hours later.
After the wedge snowplough came the invention of the rotary snowplough. It’s said to have been invented by a Canadian dentist, J W Elliot, in 1869, but he never built a working version. So it was left to another man – Orange Jull – and the Leslie Brothers of Toronto to do that.
The rotary snowplough works by a large circular arrangement of blades on a wheel, which rotate. The blades cut the snow and push it through an output chute – which can be adjusted to deposit the snow at the side of the tracks in the desired position. Controls are used to adjust the speed and direction.
The rotary snowplough proved more effective than the wedge in dealing with very heavy snowdrifts. However these types of plough were expensive, so a lot of railways chose to use ploughs with a fixed blade, and other methods to keep the snow at bay.
Nowadays, snow removal on the railways is even more advanced. Network Rail says it has various ways to try to keep the tracks clear, including: specialist snow and ice treatment trains (which come with hot-air blowers, steam jets, brushes, scrapers, heated anti-freeze jets and compressed air), passenger trains fitted with snowploughs, dedicated snowplough trains, anti-icing fluid and heating strips fitted directly to the tracks, and heaters and insulation on the points – to name
but a few.
Other countries have their own methods. In Chicago, well known for its very cold winters, the ‘L’ train has ‘sleet scrapers’ which can be deployed to keep the third rail clear of snow, sleet and ice. Also used are snowblades (mini ploughs) on the front of the trains, and de-icer systems.