Snow plowing the right way

Welcome to the Precious Metals Bug Forums

Welcome to the PMBug forums - a watering hole for folks interested in gold, silver, precious metals, sound money, investing, market and economic news, central bank monetary policies, politics and more.

Why not register an account and join the discussions? When you register an account and log in, you may enjoy additional benefits including no Google ads, market data/charts, access to trade/barter with the community and much more. Registering an account is free - you have nothing to lose!

searcher

morning
Moderator
Benefactor
Messages
34,667
Reaction score
5,868
Points
288
***Note: Original vid was pulled (don'tcha just hate that) so I found a better one.

 
Last edited:
All that fuel used up. Why not just get a flame thrower and melt it away and down the drain.
 
Sped up, of course, but that's excusable.

I've done my time moving snow...I was general-labor and garbage detail (winters) at the little town in NY State that I lived in...but we didn't have equipment like that. Some wasn't available - there weren't skid-steers or mini-crawl-tractors like that, in the mid-1970s. It's only been recently that I've seen road-graders outfitted with such elaborate snow plows as that - although I had seen a cough-remedy commercial from the mid-'70s that had the poor sufferer on the snow detail with a road grader, so I guess some departments did that.

We didn't have a grader, ,though. We had one major road through town that was a State highway, and the NYDOT crews took care of it. Our streets were all narrow side streets - we had two 4x4 pickups, a Chevrolet C60 dump truck with a plow (but not front-axle drive; we'd chain up the rear duals) and a 1958 Oshkosh all-wheel-drive dump. It had a huge plow, not a wing plow, and also a vee-plow that could be fitted in emergencies.

Nope, no rotaries. The State had them but didn't like to use them - they required a two-man crew. Wing plows on a truck, could be run with a single man, so the rotaries only came out in snow emergencies.

But...I was a sometimes driver of the C60...and, here's a secret. Unless you need momentum to get through a drift, you do NOT want to be going fast. Ten mile an hour is fine. Fast means, if you snag a manhole cover, you might just peel it off. lid and mortared-in ring, all in one. And if it's hard-packed snow or frozen slush, you might not even feel it.

If you slide sideways into a parked car at ten miles an hour, the damage might not be much. At 25, it will be considerable - and you might be liberated of your employment.

Amazing, how technology has moved ahead...even as the backwards Greens keep trying to shove us into pre-industrial times...
 
Rotaries, or even plow blades, weren't available for loaders, either.

Although we did us a loader to clear the deep January snow off the corners of intersections...scoop it up and load it onto 2.5-ton stake-dump trucks, take it out of town...
 
Original vid was pulled. New one is much better.
 
The garbage companies pick up the snow for free in Miami.
Jacksonville used to get a lot of snow imported.

No lie. Buffalo, being part of Gnu Yark Shitte...has ALL KINDS of eco-regulations, many nonsensical. For example: parking-lot snow removal people, including many that work for the city or county clearing city or county paved surfaces...they CAN NOT just truck the snow to Lake Erie, which typically has a frozen shoreline this time of year. Nor can they even take it to landfills - because, road salt, y'know.

So they have to pay to take it far away. CSX, when they took over the part of Conrail that operated in New York State...found they could use old, not-suitable gondola or hopper cars to haul away, both their own snowload, out of yards, and Buffalo's. Maybe other cities' snow.

They would load it in these old open hopper or material cars...and just attach them to trains going south. Destination Jacksonville. Zero priority - it'll get there when it gets there. Then, park the cars on sidings for two weeks, let them melt out...and if needed, run them back north for another load.
 
Back
Top Bottom