From the Spectator Australia.
It seems that it snowed in London the other day. A huge snow event apparently, it seems to have paralyzed the city. the trains couldn’t run, the buses sat in the garages, the Foreign Minister thanked dip;omats for braving the holocaust and attending a speech he was giving, and more.
Sounds like the etchings from the 18th century of people skating on the frozen Thames, doesn’t it? So how many feet of this disruptive white stuff (is that racist?) fell? Near as I can tell about 2 inches.
Well, we’ve had our chuckle, as those of us who have lived our lives in snow country always do. But is it fair? Not really.
Where I grew up on northern Indiana, we averaged about 200 inches of snow per year, mostly heavy wet lake effect snow off of Lake Michigan, that few snowblowers (short of the giant Oshkosh units on airports) could handle. I can remember on evening during sectional week, and if you know Indiana, you’ll know everybody was on the roads that night, where we got 27 inches of this stuff in 24 hours, with 50+ mile per hour winds making incredible drifts.
By 8 that night, every state highway plow in the area was in the ditch, there was an ambulance on its way to the hospital stuck in the middle of US 30, the county’s trucks weren’t far behind. Somehow we got back to dad’s office in town, a combination of a prepared vehicle, and a driver who knew what he was doing. It only took 5 hours to make 20 miles. That was it till the first of the week. Oh, the wind chill was about -50F
The gravel company’s payloader rescued the ambulance, a few of our line crews rode their snow machines in, cause we had outages too. The old government surplus wedge was on our forestry power wagon, all four non directional tires (the old style military ones) were chained, and the chip bos was full of snow. off it went with a bucket truck behind. Another bucket truck was following the tractor loader, and a couple of trucks hooked up with that aforementioned payloader.
The next morning the coounty’s maintainers with their wedge plows started opening roads, followed by trucks widening the path, the state had hired bulldozers to open the highways. It took a week to return to normal (the basketball games went on, some things are important!!)
God only know what was spent, by government, private companies, and individuals, I’d guess somewhere around 2 or 3 million dollars, and that in the old gold backed greenbacks
A few years later I was in Indianapolis when it snowed, less than a foot, and the place shut down till God made it go away. On the fifth day the hotel bar ran out of whisky talk about a catastrophe!
And that’s the difference, we had to spend the money to keep anything working, while Indy could do emergency stuff and wait. Because we had something like this every year, often more than once.
So while I laugh at the stories out of London, just as I do out of Indy, let alone the Carolinas. It wouldn’t make sense for them to spend that kind of money, both places are correct
Besides there is nothing in nature prettier than the entire landscape covered in pristine snow – especially when you’re looking at it from a warm room through the window.
This is winter view deom my hometown. It is on the Fort Wayne, the extension of the Pennsylvania Railroad to Chicago. It’s what is called a track pan, where steam engines could pick up water without stopping, at up to 60 miles per hour. This is about 10 miles from the western end of one of the fastest railroads in America, straight, level track all the way from Fort Wayne, where passenger trains routinely ran 100 miles an hour, and there are reputable reports of some reaching into the 120+ mph range. As you can imagine, not stopping saved a lot of time on a busy railroad, and few were busier than this.
In the winter, keeping this thawed with stream from an old locomotive and operating the adjacent coal dock, made the PRR the largest employer in town, mostly farmers melting that ice. After dieselization in the early 50s, there were three or so left, running the interlocking with the Monon branch to Michigan City. That was abandoned in the early seventies, and so those jobs were also gone, leaving not one railroad employee in town
But all those guys in the picture (and quite a few more were part of the cost of doing business in the winter, one that London (probably correctly) chooses not to pay.