Merry Christmas from the wild west

[NW Mailing List]

Howdy all you N&W fans out there.  I wanted to wish all of you a Merry
Christmas! For Christmas I wanted to share with all of you my early
Christmas gift. In the form a pretty good railroad story that is...

Now this is not N&W related at all, but it's a pretty big deal in general
and history in the making as well, and I'm hoping the moderators will give
me a pass on this one, as I believe everyone here would like to hear this
experience.

Any of you that have been watching the news have probably seen where the
Nebraska panhandle has been dealing with some horrid winter weather over
the last week. Well our story begins after the snow came down and the three
days of heavy wind finally stopped.

Friday December 16th 2022 dawned cold and clear in Alliance, NE. The wind
was actually calm for a the first time since Monday afternoon. When I awoke
around 7am, I found tons of messages on my phone from the previous night
regarding the fact that the Jordan Spreader sent to plow snow south of
Alliance had become stuck in a 12 foot snow drift. As I was reading these
messages I thought to myself that this winter may very well be my chance to
see the Alliance Rotary Snowplow in operation.

Around 8am I received work the Rotary was being readied for service. This
would be the first time in a decade that this rotary would be called to
service, and upon looking at the boards at work I figured I would end up on
a train and miss the opportunity to see it. Darn it. Just my luck!

Over the next couple hours I tried to get info about the plow to just come
up empty. Nobody knew when it was getting called or when it was headed
out.  All the while I was also digging the drifts out of my drive that had
appeared overnight. Around 1130am it was time for lunch and as I ate I
checked and noticed I was 1st out. Figures. I'll definitely be on a train
when the plow goes out.

At noon the phone rang with an on-duty call for 1331 on a work train, this
was very odd as I am a pool engineer. We are in a winter emergency however,
so I accepted the call and readied myself for work. I arrived work at 1330,
found my conductor Dan Bruno, and we both ventured to our local terminal
train monster's office to inquire about what the heck our work train was.
The trainmaster informed us we had a very unique assignment, that we would
be going south of Bridgeport to help open the line. At this point we are
thinking, well okay? But with what? Are we taking a train of dozers and
track hoes down or what? So we asked what we were taking, and the
trainmaster said 'that big snow blower plow thing'

Wait, hold up, could it really be? Are we really called for the Rotary Snow
Plow? As it turned out yes we were.

Now I will save you all the boredom of telling you about sweeping switches
for an hour to get out of the yard and so on and so forth and pick up this
story in Bridgeport. Upon arriving Bridgeport we picked up two roadmasters
and a couple section people and proceeded South to MP 47 where the drifts
started.

Now mind you this plow hasn't been used in 10 years. The last people that
ran it are all retired. Dave Brennan is electrician from the shop and was
the man running the blade, his first time ever. Sterling Stinson was an
machinist from the shop watching bearing temps, again his first time doing
this with some actual load on the plow. So we were off trying to figure
things out on the fly, it was like trying navigate using the starts on a
cloudy night. We had success after some extensive experimentation with the
locomotive slow speed control, and a lot of instructions from Dave (blade
man) via Dan (my conductor) to slow down and speed up. We found the sweet
spot was at .2 mph when plowing the 12 foot drifts, any faster and the plow
would big and almost plug. We were able to get most of the plowing done
before it was time to get relieved. Overall it was one wild night of winter
railroading in the wild west.

All my life I always wanted to see a rotary in action and I knew seeing one
would likely be a long shot. I never once imaged I'd be the crew on it!
Talk about an early Christmas present.

Merry Christmas Y'all!

Nathan Simmons
N&W blood workin' in the wild west.
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