ALL:
I drive a school bus and one of my fellow drivers is a retired SOO line locomotive enginer. He heard oral history that the SOO did have a rotary snowplow.
If they did, where was it stationed and when was it retired?
Ed Burns
In recent decades the Soo made do with Russell plows and Jordan Spreaders (or F7As or GP38s with pilot plows...). Here is a link to some 100-year-old photos of Soo Line's X-17, and odd corkscrew "Juli" plow at work on the Flaxton-Whitetail line. I'm not personally aware of any other Soo Line "Rotaries" but it doesn't mean there weren't any.
The Soo Line was one of the first "grangers" to widen cuts to prevent drifts from forming. A system-wide program in the 1960s and 1970s greatly reduced the number of snow-related service reductions.
rcdrye: I can't find a link in your reply.
After several web searches with different criteria, I did find this one:
http://digitalhorizonsonline.org/cdm/ref/collection/uw/id/2584
intersting corkscrew type!
Semper Vaporo
Pkgs.
Additional:
I misread the name of the plow... it is not JULI but JULL... found another site with more and better photos.
http://www.railroads-of-montana.com/Research_Soo_Line_Montana_01.htm
Besides the already mentioned Jull plow (The X-18 built in 1892 and scrapped in April 1935), the Soo Line owned several Leslie style rotaries.
There was the X-16 which was built by Cooke in 1888 and scrapped in November 1938, the already mentioned X-17 that was built by Cooke in 1907 and scrapped in November 1965, and one of four Lima built plows constructed in 1949/1950 which was numbered the X-19 and was scrapped in March 1966.
The X-19 in fact was the 2nd to last new-build Leslie style rotary plow in this country by a commercial builder (William Bros. built three of a new type of rotary plow after the winter of 1949/1950). Rock Island's Lima shows a January 1950 build date versus the December 1949 date for the Soo plow, and construction numbers show the Soo plow with a higher number than Union Pacific's pair.
The Lima's timing was poor. Diesel rotaries were just about to come into vogue, yet these were expensive and modern steam rotaries that had decades of life left in them. So far older sisters went to the front of the line for rebuilding and dieselization/electrification.
By the time the Lima's were some of the last Class 1 steam survivors and logically would've gone in for reconstruction, already mentioned right of way improvements had decreased the need. So rather than rebuild, they were retired without replacement.
Leo:
Thanks for the information. I always receiving information in response to my various questions and have met many great people on line in the process!
Happily retired NP-BN-BNSF from Minneapolis.
Orange Jull actually has very definite ties to the Leslie rotaries. He didn't invent the concept, but developed what we know today from the ideas of a Canadian dentist named J.W. Elliot.
He sold the design rights to the Leslies (perhaps a little shortsighted, there) who actually had the first production models built by the Cooke Loco Works in NJ.
Having given away the gold mine, if you will, Jull tried to re-enter the market with the cone-shaped machine. The concept was fine, if a little unorthodox, but in practice keeping the bearing at the tip of the cone properly lubricated posed serious problems. Eventually, heated oil was pumped to the bearing but that still wasn't enough.
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
Semper Vapororcdrye: I can't find a link in your reply.
Well, of course you couldn't. I didn't paste it (oops...)
If my memory is good, the article in TRAINS (late 1963) about L-H diesels included a sidebar about the rotaries built for Soo. About the time they wer delivered, Soo began a cut-widening program that lessened the need for the rotaries.
Your memory is pretty darn good.
It has an interesting bit of additional information past what's already been posted, thanks to noting that the plow was already for sale whenever this story published in November 1963 was written. So she sat for several years with no takers, since she wasn't strickened and scrapped until 1966.
I'm kind of surprised Union Pacific wasn't interested as a spare parts source since their pair remained on the active roster well into the 1980's as I recall. So perhaps they were stubbornly hoping for more than scrap value for what wasn't a cheap investment just a few years earlier, that likely was active less than a half dozen times.
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.