BOB'S GREAT GRANDFATHER PLOWING SNOW 1918
- Thread starter 1958 delivery
- Start date
Greg Reimer
Well Known Member
Turn on YouTube and enter Fordson Snow Machine 1929.What a device!! Showed some real ingenuity and thinking.It would be nice to 348 that thing and really move. I imagine that little flathead 4 cylinder tractor motor wouldn't be any lighter.
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Greg Reimer
Well Known Member
From the 1940's through about 1956, Southern Pacific Railroad had a huge class of steam locomotive known as the Cab Forward. It was over 500 tons in weight, made 6000 horsepower, and one of them could pull over 100 loaded cars, or over 150 empties up to 60 miles per hour. Donner Pass over the High Sierras used to get sometimes 20 feet of snow, so keeping that part of the transcontinental line open required some equipment. They had very large stream powered rotary snowplows that would move about anything, so they used two cab forwards to shove a rotary plow through the drifts. Ice could be a problem, but they could use live steam from any one of the boilers to blast through it. They kept the steam power active for that part of the pass until the last of them were retired(scrapped) in 1957. Must have been an impressive sight.