Are you in the area affected by this week’s blizzard conditions? Is it your responsibility to get your sidewalks and driveways cleared? Are you just tired of how the city just doesn’t do a good job of clearing the snow and ice?
You might want to try this:
It’s Snowzilla, used by the MBTA, the Boston-area mass transit agency, to clear one trolley line’s tracks of ice and snow. It’s a jet engine mounted on a small train car, and it blasts the white stuff away in an instant. They reserve it for the worst storms, and it clears the line’s five miles in under five hours.
It’s controversial, because environmentally conscious, it isn’t. It uses a lot of fuel, 900 gallons per trip up the tracks. And you can imagine the exhaust fumes. But it gets the trains running, so they’re overlooking the potential impact on the environment for now.
Sure, for your driveway, it’s overkill. But when there’s a foot or two of snow on everything, blasting it with a jet engine has its appeal.
Source: Boston Globe
Because that’s not a train line. It’s a trolley line and they get screwed in the snow.
Sooooooooo……………. Why cant you just put a plow on a train?
Ok, so, the worst part about Snowzilla is this: they have it and it’s awful and yet, they still have to shut down that part of the T and bus people!!!
I live in Boston and the public transit has been terrible since the first of these big storms hit.
“Historic” really means old as shit.
Definitely pictured a small train busting through the snow when I read this in Google Reader, still impressive but didn’t quite match the picture I painted in my brain. (Possibly a result of being snowed in today as well)