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Caption: On February 18, CN L540 was sent from Kitchener westbound to Stratford to plow the Guelph Subdivision towards London ahead of that night’s 87. Upon arrival in Stratford, CN L540 lifted Jordan Spreader # 50948 and track department crews prepared it for it’s run west. The power for L540 was 4725, 4910 and 7512. Later, in the afternoon, CN L568 would arrive in Stratford from Kitchener light power and the crews would swap power.
Here CN L568 is pictured finally departing Stratford passing the station as they begin spreading westward. Reportedly, they made it to a point west of St. Marys before returning east to Stratford later that evening, with that night’s VIA Rail 87 also being cancelled as well.
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Nicely captured. A tired looking spreader, not much pride of ownership and in my opinion not the best piece of equipment to be utilized for clearing the main track, a plow could do a much better job clearing the four foot and cuts at speed, too late to pull them out of the scrap pile.
Terry’s comment is spot on. 50 odd years ago on CP, the goal with the plow according to the late snowplow foreman “Casper” Weir, was to “shoot the snow over the ROW fence so it didn’t come back for a while”. We did use spreaders on the main line to widen out deep cuts, but they were mostly used in yards to clear the whole yard by pushing the snow in one direction until the whole mess was off the last track. This usually involved having another job pulling all the cars out of the track & putting them back as the spreader moved from track to track.
All aspects of the above comments are absolutely correct! I couldn’t agree more.
A little (a lot) of TLC is needed on that spreader. Starting with a little prime & paint, then application of the CN running number and the correct SLOW or HIGH SPEED stenciling!
Nice to see the locomotive style headlight on the leading end of the spreader was finally repaired.
Thanks for all the comments guys.