Caption: There was a time in southern Ontario when you needed to call out snow plows to keep rail lines open. CP's Goderich sub was notoriously bad for "lake effect" snow and, starting in the mid-1970s, CP began to use FP7s on the line during the worst of the winter. FP7 4061, normally assigned to Western Lines provides the muscle behind plow 401006 in February 1976. CN picked up the practice a couple of years later, assigning F-units to plow duty out of Stratford.
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great photo from a long gone time. Given the position of the plow, I wonder if this is a mainline plow headed west for London rather than coming off the Goderich? In heavy snow years, the same plow that did the Woodstock branches sometimes also plowed the main trtack to Guelph Jct, and then used the double track plow to do to Streetsville & return. They would then leave the double track plow at Guelph Jct & do the main back to London or as far as Woodstock if the branches had not been done yet or needed plowing again. Also, the employee looks like it might be Jack Anderson who worked the mainline & Woodstock plows.
A great plow shot. The snow looks well packed on the nose. The plow headlight sure looks nice.
Tracked down the date of this shot–6 January 1973.
correction–date was 8 February 1976.
I’ll dig up my old time books, with an exact date, I might have some info on this plow & the story behind it.