During a blinding snowstorm a head-on collision occurred at Philadelphia between a passenger train and snowplow.
The advent of the rotary snowplow eased the strain on the shovelers as well as on the pocketbook of the railroad company.
Old Man Winter on the Hojack
By Richard Palmer
In the archives of the Central N.Y. Chapter, National Railway Historical Society, is a collection of railroad photographs including numerous snow scenes up on the “Hojack,” taken in the early 1900s. If a picture is worth a thousand words it certainly is true in this case. These two scenes were taken at Philadelphia, N.Y. in February, 1912. The first scene is the aftermath of a collision between a passenger train and snowplow on February 23, 1912. The second scene shows a rotary snowplow coming to the rescue. The Rome, Watertown & Ogdensburg was one of the first railroads in the East to employ rotary snowplows.
Snowfighting was a major line item on the annual budgets of the R.W. & O. and its successor, the New York Central. Throughout the “Hojack” system it wasn’t uncommon for snow to pack in gifts 12 to 16 feet in height. Railroaders in this region prepared accordingly to cope with, and encountered tremendous snow storms that fortunately are few and far between these days. Some sections of the railroad were blocked for days - even weeks at a time.
In his book “The Modern Railroad,” written in 1911, historian Edward Hungerford - a native of Watertown, noted that when the R. W. & O. “whose rails rest through a snow belt finds the winter clouds blackening, it puts on its fighting armor. Every man at headquarters sticks by his desk. The superintendent gets bulletins from each terminal and important yard every hour, perhaps oftener. Those bulletins give him exact information - the amount of motive power ready at each roundhouse, freight congestion, if any; amount and dirfection of wind, cloud and snow conditions.
“In recent years, that nasty stretch of railroad line has kept the railroaders busy. We have seen a rotary plow spend 60 minutes going six feet through a heavy drift that could be three miles long and 20 feet deep. Snow can drift, and we snow packed until you begin to think of dynamite as a resource. Three days of such snow fighting would completely weary the ordinary man. Up in the snow belts they are likely to get a hard storm every week from November to March, and that atop of the heaviest traffic of the year. It is the sort of fighting that marks the fine-grained timber of a man; that sends him down to headquarters in some city along the seaboard, to fight the weighty battles of traffic and operation , which are unending within and between the mighty railroads of America."
