The REAL Snowpiercer - The Rotary! | Railroad 101
2024 ж. 22 Мам.
236 771 Рет қаралды
The rotary snowplow is a fantastic piece of equipment that really helped solve a big problem on the railroad: snow. Special thanks to @crrm as always!
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00:00 Intro
01:04 Using the Pilot
01:29 Pilot Plow
02:08 Flanger
03:36 Wedge Plow
05:10 Rotary 99201
07:15 Maintenance Hatches
09:15 Engineer's Side Interior
10:46 Cab Tour
14:00 Pilot House Tour
17:28 Fireman's Side Interior
18:02 Rotary OY In Action
22:15 Rotary OY Reaches Cumbres Pass
22:44 Outro
26:46 Frosty had to pay...
From the Colorado Railroad Museum archives: Mac Poor interviews George Champion about the last Rotary Snowplow through the Alpine Tunnel: kzhead.info/sun/i5qwj6einpp4gaM/bejne.htmlsi=PAa-C3mBkooHRmEs
.... we have this? Holy shit. I mean, really, holy shit.
@Hyce777 yes....we have so much in the library that is untapped....
r e a l
I follow yall on facebook and I’m a top fan
My main source "Rails that Climb." It's a Colorado Railroad Museum publication, and if you haven't read it shame on you!
Breaking news: Colorado Highway Patrol has arrested a suspect in the murder of a snowman at the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic. The suspect, a man named Mark Huber, has been sentenced to execution by liming.
@@kholdanstaalstorm6881 LIMES!
I would think he would spend time in the cooler. 🤣
Imagine being tied to the tracks by a mustache twirling villain while this thing is coming
f
cartoon nightmare
It would be strawberry flavor snow
@@aidenmckenney3280 yes
🤣🤣🤣🤣
I think we would need a truckload of oranges for that juicer
Limes
It is a big margarita mixer....
LIMES!!!
@@Hyce777 Dont tell carl, turtle will get even more drunk then he already is.
@@Hyce777That's quite the way to deliver Mystery Citrus.
487 and 484 did not sound happy with all that wheel slippage. All that weight in front of them, plus icy rails. I bet the two of them were pretty grumpy when they got back to the roundhouse later. XD That's so awesome that you got to be a part of that, though. Nice to see that some parts of this country are still getting decent snowfalls.
I'm guessing 484 and 487's engineers would have been mentally and physically exhausted, just trying to keep them rolling.
Either that, or they were having the time of their lives. No in-between.
@@random0clockwould noy suprise me if folks who did that was in eather camp but NEVER both.
The drivers would have been sitting on the throttles the whole time, tired wrists.
Seeing those two engines both slipping really shows that traction requirements of this operation. A foot or two of snow doesn't look like much next to a massive locomotive, but that is still ample amounts of snow to move. Also doesn't help that it is a literal uphill battle here as well.
Yup. 4% all the way...
@@Hyce777 4% is quite steep for a train. At least it doesn't have to worry about a lengthy set of wagons trailing behind.
Is that what was making that noise that sounded like popping? EDIT: yep I just reached the part that clearly shows the engine losing traction and just chuffing like mad.
@@airplanemaniacgaming7877 Yup, just the wheels slipping and the valves letting the pistons rev up. Inevitably stalling out since the mechanism can only go "that fast", and eventually the engineer lets off the pressure a bit so that the wheels spin down and regain traction again. Sure makes for an interesting sound.
@@todayonthebenchone engine was going steadier than the other, maybe the other guy was trying to rev up to fast?
When 99201 got the new carbody, it also received a surplus boiler from 0-6-0 #232. So there is at least a part of one of the C&S's fleet of 0-6-0's remaining.
Well that's neat as hell!
@@Hyce777no it’s Dusty’s friend Jimmy from the cog
@@BaikieRyan
Why was there no anti rust grease on the piston rods etc? It's gonna rip the hell out of the seals.
My Grandpa was an Engineer for Great Northern and then B.N., he would go back and forth hauling freight between Spokane and Whitefish. He'd talk of spending some miserable night stuck on some spur waiting for the plow to come clear the pass. I asked if it was miserable from the cold? "Cold!, hell I kept it warm as Miami, I just wanted to go home". Miss you Grandpa.
Listening to that rotary plow just humming away on the governor is amazing. No wonder it’s fuel and water hungry.
I love cool train snow plowing accessories. My favorite that I see every so often traveling Boston is a jet engine on a train car
Ah, Snowzilla. That one’s fun! In the winter of 2015, I saw it clearing snow at Quincy Center station. It was loud and impressive.
On the my ‘home road’, the Newfoundland railway, had a few ‘plow cabooses’. They where shaped like cabooses, but with one end being a massive plow. We also had a flamethrower ice melter, for switches. If I recall correctly, it was built by the US navy when there where here in WWII. Dunno how long it lasted, but not long
The RGS had one like that as well. :)
of course the navy wants to play with fire, and makes something as insane as that.
Judging by the way Frosty turned to orange slush there was some seriously oxidized paint or a lot of hidden surface rust on OY's blades. I know Illinois Railway Museum has it's former CGW plow because some time in the late 2Ks some brain wizard in UP's accounting department saw somewhere on a balance sheet all these surplus pieces of equipment sitting disused on yard sidings all over the upper midwest and thought taking the tax write-off would help the bottom line and earn him some kudos, apparently ran it by someone and got the OK and the " surplus " equipment got sent off to various museums or scrap. Just one small problem that winter when a huge blizzard hit Minnesota and the UP needed to break out the serious snow fighting equipment on their former CNW holdings and found empty sidings where that " surplus " equipment had been stored. Yep Einstein in accounting had gotten rid of all the snowplows and effectively shutdown UP in the state of Minnesota for 2 or 3 days.
Did Einstein keep his job?
Would have loved to be in earshot of that meeting.
Woops.... that sounds *just* like the railroad. lol
@@terryrerecich3869Probably got promoted to C-suite with such short-term, shareholder-friendly thinking.
Pretty sure that discoloration is actually a visual artifact of it being a “colorized” black and white video.
My favourite train period. My childhood was spent taking the same VHS out of the library over and over and over of these great paddleboard-faced trains and watching them spew snow from the tracks, they're nostalgic. Never could find that video again, but there's still something so magical about seeing a big shed of a steam engine crawling down the line spewing snow and coal-soot. There's something about them (and signaling back to the propelling engines behind them) that makes them feel like living, breathing beasts instead of tools.
I want to say it was Giants of the Rails because I am almost certain I too checked out that video way too many times from my library as a kid.
@@Hybris51129 I'll check it out.. I doubt it's mine since it seems that is just big trains in general and the one I remember was specifically rotary snowploughs, but it's a lead as good as any. Thank you!
The WP&YR has had their rotary up and running for the last 30 years, and its quite incredible looking at the old photographs of rotaries in snow deeper than the roof of the cab, but even the snow became too much for the rotaries sometimes as 20 proved on lizard head pass in 1938
Yes! The most Canadian railroad car ever made!
Snow? what is that? Aussie Railroads never really had machinery for this kinda snow. Fascinating stuff.
Man the Rotary Snowplow is a marvel of snow removal equipment. I know Union Pacific still uses Rotary Snowplows over Donner Pass.
The rotary snow plow was invented in Canada by Toronto dentist Dr. J.W. Elliot in 1869. I don't think they're used much in Canada anymore; heavy earth moving equipment is used instead. Rotary plows were good at clearing snow drifts on the prairies, but avalanches in the mountain often caused the blades to break as the snow often contained rocks and tree stumps, etc.
This makes me think of a picture on the Colorado Midland of a rotary being pushed by at least 3 maybe 4 locomotives on the run up to the continental divide
I was a member of Union Pacific railroad Snowfighters from 2008-2020 on Donner Summit. I and my coworkers helped rebuild 5 flangers, 5 Jordan spreaders, and 2 Rotaries. Ours are now 21st century equipment. I’m proud of my work on this project to modernize this Historic equipment.
I remember a while back we (Museum staff) discussed doing a Rotary demo on compressed air....pretty sure we actually tested the boiler and confirmed it was doable.....I want to fire it up and throw a watermelon in (as an homage to that time we crushed a watermelon with the OB Piledriver).
kzhead.info/sun/h6aDqdV5b5GXh6c/bejne.html
If the boiler holds pressure its almost worth restoring it to working condition
A certain Stromboli ran it on steam ~10 years ago... so yeah, air, very doable. That'd be cool!
@the_retag I was (and still am) an Office Rat, so I din't get all the details....
@@akaBoG office work is often overlooked but just as important as tinkering on the trains, where else would parts and donations, permit etc. come from
11:39 is such a scientific demonstration... It had me laughing on the floor.
Took my senior photos in front of that beautiful machine. So glad my favorite piece of railway equipment (yes including locomotives) got highlighted on this channel!
Spectacular, what a symphony of steam you have captured, the OY giving its all is something else! A great explanation and look at the museum’s rotary plow too! So cool to see history preserved and appreciated like that.
Hi Mark! Nice to see that you did a video on Rotary snowplows my favorite Rotary snowplow being Rotary OY on the C&T and as for the Engineer on the rotary. Rotary Snowplow Enginners are called the Piolet or the Wheelman
Is Piolet pronounced how it's spelled, or "Pee-uh-lay"?
@@sambrown6426 As far as I know it's the same as Pilot(I've also seen it spelled just like pilot as well).
@@zaklex3165 Ok, thanks.
DSP&P held mechanical snowplow trials early on-- pitting a Leslie rotary against this plow thing invented by Orange Jull. Picture a rotary body with a giant woodscrew cantilevered out the front. Needless to say, the rotary won. Also, the last rotaries built by Lima for UP and RI were oil fired, were equipped with a Worthington feedwater heater, and drove the wheel with a three-cylinder Shay engine.
Oh damn. That's cool as hell.
Don't forget thought that a few Jull rotary plows were actually constructed and sold...according to the history on them.
One small correction: Quite a few of the later Lima plows drove the wheel with a Shay engine. But, according to an online copy of a writeup by Harold Rees from 1966, the circa-1949 Lima UP rotaries used _two_ Shay engines. And were rated at 2000hp.
@@zaklex3165From what I remember reading, the Jull Excavators had issues with their front bearing overheating on the screw plow, which looked like a giant cone angled down to a point in one corner of the plow hood. I always wondered how that could be with the bearing always being shoved deep into whatever snow was being plowed. The business end of these were such an outrageous-looking piece of equipment that it's a pity they weren't successful.
@@RailRideIt would be fun to build a model of that. Or a digital version for a train simulator.
We here in Newfoundland didn't seem to have rotaries, as blindingly obvious as it is now that we needed them. We had the massive wedge plows mounted on custom modified caboose that we'd stick on the front of the train.
I really would love to see these in action. Born and raised in upstate NY, we get to see the huge plows with the cabs on top of the blade. Taller than a 2 story house, and very intimidating up close. Thanks for this!
At the railroad museum I visit often, they a have Lake Superior and Ishpeming plow car. It is similar in size to the rotary, however, it just has a gigantic plow at the front. Kind of similar to the plow shown on the gondola but without the bottom wedge and much bigger. I’d also say that the rotary is much more comfortable, even with the giant boiler running through the middle. The plow car inside is mostly empty, except for the handbrake and what I presume to be some form of coal heater. There is also no seating inside the car at all. There is a copula at the top of the car as well. Unlike a caboose, the actual copula is actually at the front of the car. The copula is larger than that of a caboose’s and has the closest thing towards seating (a set of wooden latter like stairs that lead to the back window of the copula to get to top of the car). Both sets of wooden stairs (one to get up to the copula) were not heated so you can say goodbye to your warm behind if you decided to sit down.
The Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania (Strasburg, PA) has a giant steel plow car.
We have a similar one at the national transportation museum in st Louis, its silver and has the union Pacific crest on the sides
WHEN WORKING FOR SANTA FE IN ARGENTINE I GOT IN 4 DAYS OF HARD LABOR WORKING ON SANTA FES LONE DIESEL-ELECTRIC ROTARY, ON AN EMERGENCY REPAIR! AS IT WAS BEING USED IN WESTERN KANSAS , THE MECHANICAL ATTENDANT WAS NOT AWARE OF THE LUBRICATION NEEDS OF THE 4 EMD TRACTION MOTORS AND LINESHAFTS TURNING THE MAINSHAFT AND ROTOR! ALL OF THIS WAS LUBRICATED WITH AN STEAM LOCOMOTIVE LUBRICATION PUMP WHICH WAS NOT REFILLED, CAUSING THE BEARINGS TO OVERHEAT AND FAIL! FINALLY ON THE FOURTH DAY, REPAIR COMPLETED, I GOT TO FIRE UP THE LOCOMOTIVE CABLED TO IT, AND ROLL THE ROTOR FOR AN 2 HOUR BREAK IN AND BEARING CHECK! I DID NOT, HOWEVER GET TO GO WHERE IT WAS NEEDED AND SEE HER AT WORK! KEEP THEM ROLLING BROTHERS!👍👍
One of my fondest memories was an ancient VHS video of a snowpiercer slowly moved its way through the Rockies I believe, tossing snow in what my childish imagination remembers being "hundreds of feet!" as I excitedly told everyone I could. Thanks for this vid and now I feel old lol
Epic hearing the wheel slippage.
The 1974 movie "Murder on the Orient Express" has some really cool footage of a steam locomotive pushing a large snow plow, with wheel slip and everything. I believe it's not a model, but the snow may be fake.
They have one of these parked beside the road between Kenai and Anchorage, AK. They used to use it to clear snow from the tracks, but it later became a museum piece for a small roadside museum
The Railroad 101 videos are still my favorites! I never considered just shoveling snow in as a source of water. Looks like OY carried its own extra tank car of water.
It did! Snow wasn't quite high enough to actually make it work.
I noticed it also had its own designated camp car on the back of the train, which says rather a lot about how often they used it and what the shifts were like. They were clearly planning for some serious outings on a regular basis!
Thanks Hyce. My favorite piece of rolling stock.
I was at that train museum last summer I might have talked to you. I got to watch one of the tiny blue steam engines turn on. It had some name but it was so long ago. I like was walking around that snow plow on that track. I’m so happy.
The rotary snowplow, also known as one of the coolest pieces of rolling stock.
This may have already been mentioned in the comments, but a few interurbans and street railways had self-propelled electric rotary plows. The Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company, for example, had three. All three were converted to wedge plows at the end of the 1920s.
Rotaries are my absolute favorite as well. Got lucky to see one moving around in Truckee last year.
I wonder if diesel powered rotaries have train controls in the cab as well as the plow controls so that the engineer could just MU the engines to the back of the plow. I know that something similar was done back in the steam days, not necessarily in America. Some railroads did it, like the Southern Pacific, but mostly in Canada and Scandinavia, there would be a series of cable-driven levers in the snowplow's cab that would actuate the locomotive controls. Pretty much just like steam powered inter-urban trains back in the day, where there would be a set of controls at each end of the train; one in the cab and one in the last car. Pretty awesome video, my man! I've always loved rotaries for the sheer amount of snow they could move, and I've always wanted an inside look at one. Thanks so much!
I have heard of that as well - the engineer just runs from the rotary.
I was trying to find more info on these last month and now you upload this!! I'm so happy
11:38 Love the sound effects. Hyce makes every video fun
My fav. Rotary I saw was a WP down in Portola if I'm not mistaken. Very pretty looking thing.
Thank you so much for making this. This is the sort of thing you never get to see the inside of -even at a museum.
Awesome to watch. Thanks for showing!
this is a very interesting video! I never thought I'd know this much about Rotary plows (honestly, I didn't even realize you guys had one!) but I'm glad that ha changed.
Amazing footage of it in action, seeing the two locomotives struggling and slipping to push it really demonstrated just how much work it was doing in a really visceral way.
I don't normally watch this type of content, but this caught my attention at something called "The Rotary" and involving trains and, I can say, this was very interesting and cool.
Hyce your videos are always 11/10. Thank you so much for this super fun video!
Great video Hyce thanks! Such amazing machinery, seeing it in action was great, poor locomotives struggling for traction trying to push all that
Man, how excited this guy is about trains makes me happy.
Top notch video! I don’t think I’ll be able to think about rotaries again without associating them with Snowmanocide but hey! That’s still some really cool stuff! Thank you so much for sharing!
its nice seeing this since it was the one things that kept mountain passes open so small towns could get things they need during heavy storms. Next thing on your channel that i would like to see is what would the old railroad do when you had a derailment.
This is fascinating! Thank you, Hyce!!
Hi Mark, getting your expert’s tour of the CRRM’s rotary snow plow was such a treat! Quite something to observe how the interior spaces are divided up, where all the controls and crew go (or should I say squeeze into) and all that. Familiar but different. Really liked the historic context you gave us as well. BTW, the new paint scheme looks amazing, OMG! Huzzah to the museum crew for yet another ultra-fantastic restoration job! The footage you took, Mark, of the C&TS rotary plow was as you said mesmerizing and may I also add majestic. Snow plumes, steam and smoke billowing everywhere such an amazing sight! Like watching Old Faithful, but with choo choos 🤣! An incredible video, thanks as always for creating this latest excellent 101 episode Professor and cheers to you and the CRRM!
Seeing his enthusiasm is inspiring even though I don't know any thing on the matter
Great presentation as always!
Yet another example of an ingenious solution to a common problem by the railroad. Very cool footage of the one being used by the Cumbres & Toltec!
thank you! great camera work.
Been watching your videos, very interesting and learn new things. You don't go overboard with descriptions, or under describe. Can tell you enjoy talking about them. Thanks, and maybe sometime well see you at the museum.
Thank you for sharing and explaining these unique pieces of equipment. I have seen the diesel rotary snowplow at the California State Railroad museum, I had also seen the clips of the C&TS rotary OY, clips before but I saw them when I first found this channel and before I understood what exactly was happening.
Rotaries are so dang cool!
I love snowpiercer, it's actually the reason I enjoy locomotives and such. This was a cool video.
This was incredible thanks Hyce!!!!!
This should have a lot more views.
Thank you my friend! I appreciate that. Good to see you here. :)
Really interesting and informative, love that youtube decided to recommend this :D May you rest in peace Frosty!
im not much of a train guy. as my name would implicate im more of a plane guy, but god you have made it so easy for me to understand trains and such. thank you very much Hyce!
I live in Alaska and there are several of these retired rotary plows set at museums and tourist spots to look at
Possibly the most badass steam locomotive effort I have ever seen!
The SP converted some of their rotaries to electric, they took F7B’s removed the traction motors and placed them in the plow. The F7B power to the rotary this still had to be pushed as the b unit had no motors. The D&SL had some of the largest rotaries built, I think these were sold to the NP or GN. That rotary inside is kind of like a caboose with a C19 inside of it. Thanks again for a very entertaining and informative video.
BNSF did the same.
Hyce, back when Athern was still producing kits, I thought about building their rotary and putting a dummy F unit behind it. Of course it would not be on my layout as I was interested in late 1800, early 1900 steam at the time. The other observation is, why didn’t Athern ever provide a tender?@@Hyce777
Don't forget - most rotaries ended up with auxiliary water cars since they were quite water hungry. The locomotives usually drew the short straw as they are filling the cisterns from the front to the rear, they have known to run out of water (497 case in point) and every time they had a chance, they had men shoveling snow in their tenders as fast as they can, albeit not enough sometimes and that's when the engineer gives a long blast on the whistle to let them know he is about to the point he has to drop his fire.
Oh wow.
The wheel Slip is insane!
Cool stuff, thanks for sharing.
Many thanks to Hyce for the videos he has made about steam locomotives, you helped me recharge my loves for steam locomotives. Thanks to you I started working at a railway museum. Thank you Hyce
I remember them as a kid in Canada. Sadly we don't make use of them any more, but it is good that Union Pacific still does. The example you are showing has quite the heavy flywheel to try to keep it from bogging down.
As does the BNSF, which had theirs out and about this winter in Nebraska clearing a bunch of lines(you can find video of it online here).
That's a new measurement one hyce
"Americans will use anything but the metric system"
@@Hyce777so it’s common for museums to use their curators and personal as units of measurements apparently. In terms of Hyces how tall is peaches?
Meme I saw online years ago with a pic of a rotary plow captioned "cow catcher makes ground beef" will always stick in my head. Thanks for the informative video!
That Rotary Snowplow reminds me of the one that I found entirely by chance just outside of Anchorage, Alaska, in the Potter Section House Railroad Museum. The Museum itself has, very sadly, seen better days (so it seems--it was closed when I discovered it), but the centerpiece, the Rotary Plow itself, is still very visitable (from the outside, anyway). Heartily recommend visiting, should you ever be in that area.
That rotary in action video is sick!
I started playing derail valley because of your videos and have gotten to the point of using 7 DE2's and a slug, I am playing on casual difficulty but I'm glad that you got me into this game
Snow goes spin
Despite being Diesel-Electric, UPs rotarys still have steam whistles, since they were originally steam powered but got rebuilt to be electric and paired with converted B-Units The steam generator in the B-Unit from its passenger days provides the steam for the whistle, as well as for heating the blower to melt accumulated snow and ice, however they have E-Bells now, so, it's quite the juxtaposition...
Ahhh to spend a day with Hyce, I so deeply want to be involved in US locos and everything to do with them, all I get in Wales is narrow gauge novelty engines
Train burnout. Awesome to see old tech in action.
This was awesome!
Great video! It is interesting to see how it works!
Saw one of these in person up in Skagway. They're INTIMIDATING
Finally, I’ve been asking so many questions about these trains
Great work!
That was amazing! ❤🚂🏋️
Thank you for sharing 😊
Hyce: a marvelous presentation. :-)
Cool. Really menacing look to it
that is one bigass wedge
Frosty thought he could beat the system.
I was in Alaska in the late 90's. They still used them and I'll bet they still do.
Thanks Hyce.
Very very impressive video. Thanks bro. We just got 1 foot of snow here in central Vermont. Could have used it to clear my driveway. lol