Snow on the railroads

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Stephen C. Host / railpictures.ca photo: Kinburn Line between Seaforth, Ontario and Clinton, Ontario on Feb. 2, 2014.

by JIM ALGIE  

Snow and cold weather so far this winter have delayed grain deliveries by rail throughout Canada, including snow-belt regions of Ontario, Genesee-Wyoming Railroad marketing manager David Warne said, Friday.

Heavy snowfall in early February stranded a rail plow and three accompanying locomotives at Ward’s Cut inland from Lake Huron on Genesse-Wyoming’s Goderich-Exeter Railroad (GEXR). It took 20 men, three excavating contractors and a day and a half of work to free the plow convoy at Ward’s Cut, Warne said.

“We’re through most of it now,” he said. “It’s not just us,” Warne added. “You have to understand that most of the Canadian rail network has been hit pretty bad because of freezing cold temperatures and, in certain areas, snow accumulation.”

Photos of the GERX snow jam at Ward’s Cut near Goderich as well as others along the similarly snow-packed Clinton-Centralia line have begun circulating on the Internet. Warne distributed some of the photos to agricultural customers to illustrate transport challenges presented by “highly unusual” winter conditions this year.

“It’s like the snow storms you used to see back in the ‘40s and ‘50s,” Warne said from his Hamilton office. A Genesse-Wyoming employee for three years and a railroad buff since youth, Warne has never seen winter working conditions this bad. It’s the first time in seven years they’ve had to use the plow locomotive on GEXR track.

The Stratford to Goderich line “is susceptible, like many areas up there, to lake effect snow in heavy bands,” Warne said. “We have a particular section between Clinton and Goderich which is sort of the last 10 miles before you hit the lake.”

Where it enters a depression known as Ward’s Cut the track bed tends to fill and drift with snow, particularly in windy conditions. The plow-train unit made up of four locomotives (which combined put out 8,700 hp and when you add in the plow weigh more than a million pounds) had been clearing track at the rate of about 40 miles per hour when it stuck.

Warne notes that normally, the line limit is 25 mph but a special exception is made for plow service. “To get through big drifts, those plows are designed to project the snow far to the sides and need a bit of extra speed,” he explained.

Speed had nothing to do with the plow service getting stuck, he added.

“The drift was just too big,” Warne said.

Grain, beans, corn and animal feed products make up the largest volume of freight on GERX tracks, Warne said. This year’s winter conditions have caused delays on both the Goderich line and the Clinton to Centralia serving several, major, grain storage facilities.

“I talk to agricultural customers every day and they’re all telling me they’re having problems across the whole network,” he said, referring to delays elsewhere in North America. Service on the Clinton-Centralia line was delayed about two weeks, Warne said.

“We had to get a very large snow blower to blow it out,” he said of problems on the Clinton-Centralia line. “We had snow banks that were eight and 10 ft. high, drifts that we had to literally cut through.”

The Ward’s Cut job relied on local contractors with three excavators and a tractor-mounted snow blower to help free stranded locomotives. The plow convoy carried no freight.

“It’s too risky to run a plow with a train for the very reason that, never mind you’ve got your own assets stuck, now you’ve got other people’s assets and freight stuck,” Warne said. “We would never take customers’ freight with us to do a job like this,” he said.

Connecticut-based Genesse-Wyoming Inc. operates 111 short line and regional railroads in Canada, the United States, Australia, Belgium and The Netherlands. In addition to southwestern Ontario lines, the company’s Ontario operations include the Huron Central from Sudbury to Sault Ste. Marie, the Ottawa Valley line from Sudbury to Temiskaming and the Southern Ontario Railroad from the port of Hamilton and between Brantford and Nanticoke. BF