Jet engines are also used to dry the Indianapolis Speedway track after rain causes the Indy 500 to be stopped. The drying cars have the exhaust of the jet/gas turbine engine directed down into the track. Not only does this blow water away but also evaporates the remaining moisture but also heats up the surface of the track so the tires of the race cars have better traction.
@@juliojonathan8348 I flatter myself that I endeavored to submit a pun even at the expense of an arm and a leg. That they weren’t mine shouldn’t diminish my valor. I simply had a bone to pick with our patron commenter.
@@jmcginty96 your bold statement backed with your assertive action is truly commendable. For that, you earned my utmost respect, and I wish your endeavour be smooth and the destination fruitful.
Snow jets also melts the snow and tend to freeze switches . One yardmaster I worked for didn't want them in his yard. Now they use a special hirail truck that blows unheated air to clear the snow out of switches without melting the snow.
Some air force use it on a wheel and have same issues. Snow splatter in slush form and makes ice chunks hanging everywhere including hanger doors. Horrible stuff.
Apparently they had a heavy lorry with jet engine mounted on it to clear snow on a runway at a British fighter base. A friend based there told me about it. The base was used for the interception of Russian Bear TU95 bombers, so it had to be 24=7-365.
I can't remember the last time we had snow deep enough to be a concern here in the UK. It has certainly been cold enough each winter, with temperatures regularly falling well below zero, but we have been getting very little snow and what we do get never seems to stick. It saddens me a little, I love the feeling of sitting inside when there's inclement weather, wrapped in a blanket with a hot drink, I have had to make do with holding the increasing number of thunder storms in contempt with a cup of tea.
Same thoughts here. Born in '77, growing up for the most part every winter usually guaranteed several feet of snow. That trend seemed to falter by the late 90s to early 2000s. With the odd exception there has been little snowfall in more recent years and as you point out it doesn't seem to stick anymore. I remember piles of snow cleared from pavements and roads hanging around for weeks as a kid! The contempt and tea during a thunderstorm comment did make me laugh!
It used to be that busses were the last things running in snow but since they closed the skid pan at Chiswick Works London Transport garage all their vehicles if there's a millimetre of settled snow
Actually no. Air forced One is a cold air blower. The blower is powered by a secondary diesel engine. The other option is jet powered and the jet exhaust is used to blow and melt snow.
That first green jet snowblower shown, I heard that one of the New York Central black beetle jet powered train’s jets is now used on that specific model. I am still sad they could not preserve the NYC black beetle, but at least one of its engines are still being used.
That’s crazy. I’m from Phoenix Arizona so I never really dealt with snow and winter conditions. Our winters are 65-70 degrees lol. But I have lived in Boston,New York,Europe and Montreal Canada during a winter and that shit is brutal especially Montreal. It is so cold up there lol
it will shift a lot of snow at reasonable speed & will uncover fallen trees with enough time to hit them gently or even stop, thereby minimizing damage to the equipment.
Great work as always! And thank you for crediting your video/image/audio sources in the description! More people need to do that. Please consider including clickable links.
I would imagine back in those days, as jet engines first came out and began to rapidly advance, there were likely a whole bunch of older or obsolete models leftover that no one really knew what to do with.
We used them in the Royal Air Force during the harsh winters back in the 70's. There was a fuel tanker with a rig on the fronts and either one or two engines mounted. With that and a small fleet of Land Rover's , the working party would clear the main runway followed by taxi ways. We kept the Vulcan bombers flying, no matter what.
I worked on these when I was with NS. The ones we had were changed over from other equipment and had Rolls Royce jet engines converted to run on diesel. I've blown people down from 80 feet away with these things. And it's great fun to blow the ballast rock all over the place. 😆
It cracks me up every winter when it’s on the news. Those switches have gas lines running to them and have burner’s like a gas grill. But people think they are on fire 🤣🤣
The jet blowers are more commonly used to de-ice the plow so the locomotive doesn't have to carry around the extra weight of all of the snow stuck to it
Those cause almost as many problems as they solve. The jets blow ice away. They also blow all the ballast away if the operator is not paying attention.
Those ballast stones are pretty well compacted and frozen i wouldn't worry that much about it and if so put a swinging guard of thicker rubber on The sides away from the direct blast of the jet exhaust
I work for a railway driving trains. Ive seen one twice in 15 years. Both looked like the yellow one with the nozzle. The first one had FLAMETHROWER written on the side. The second time i saw one it was parked in one spot for a month or two. I pointed it out to every person i worked with and most guys didnt even notice it was a jet engine. What typically gets used is a big truck with rail gear and some sort of blower motor. Its called "Air Forced One". Google "AF1 EVO" if youre curious.
As a kid I'd go up on the Laramie Avenue Bridge in Cicero, Illinois, USA (which abuts Chicago) and watch the firefly lights of the switch (point) fires on winter evenings. The rail yard there is HUGE, lots of little fires back then.
Do they even get enough snow in the UK to need blowing? Up in the northern US we'll get several FEET of snow build up every year, and its only very rarely that the tracks need to be plowed, let alone jet-blasted...
Yes, the UK used to get A LOT of snow years back. These days not so much, asides the odd harsh winter flurry. We also used to get sustained periods of freezing weather.
The UK example shown was from 1948, back then there was a _LOT_ of snow. More recently, every lead locomotive & motor-car has a small plough attached to the front bogie. They're often left in place year-round because they will also clear litter & small tree branches.
Modify them to be more efficient, have them angled even with the tracks rather than blowing down to them, similar technology to eliminate the downside of operating them.
The Soviets used the TMS-65 (and the Czechoslovak TZ-74) jet engine equipped decontamination vehicles to clear airport runways from snow and ice if in a hurry.
Those track fires shown were a sticky rope like thing what burns for about 30 min. We also use it to heat up tracks to get them to expand slightly when we need to repair a bolted connector.
Can I have one for my driveway? Oh wait, that's the videos going around where people are using their leaf blowers like this, right? I guess I just do that?
I wonder if you could use high power lasers to melt snow in a similar context. At those kinds of output levels though, light refraction and reflection of and through the snow probably creates a lot of hazards. Would it even work in practical application though? Or would the physical and optical characteristics of snow make it too hazardous to the surroundings or too inefficent to really work? High power lasers are awesome, but they are usually not particularly good for heating air. And snow is commonly 80-90+% air, the rest a bunch of rather reflective ice crystals. Adding to it, water takes a notoriously high amount of energy to force through phase change; it's not just "X joules to heat Y mass of ice to -1°C, 2X heat it to 0°C, 3X heat it to 1°C and now it's also all turned to water". It stays 0°C ice until enough energy has been applied for it to phase change to 0°C water. Same when going from water to ice, only then you need to _extract_ energy from your 0°C Y mass of water, for it to turn into 0°C ice.
You can run the train on the same fuel as the jet because they're both kerosene products. You're also not trying to fly the train. You can also run older cars on avgas. Not recommended for newer vehicles though bc of the lead deposit. The octane is a little higher, but the LL after the number stands for low lead.
@@captainotto it's stabilized - you can leave it for months or even years & expect the same performance - relevant for garaged vehicles that only get used a couple of times a year.
Why not a plow that has flamethrowers underneath or maybe even some kind of induction heating system? Seems like it could be a far better solution while being far more efficient.
![BLACK BAG - Official Trailer [HD] - Only in Theaters March 14](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Du0Xp8WX_7I/mqdefault.jpg)
Imagine if they accidentally start the afterburner and start melting the railroad tracks
Thats okay because jet fuel cant melt steel beams
@@gaveintothedarknessoh wow, that came outta nowhere……
I said, that *came outta nowhere* …………
I’ll see myself out 😅
@@gaveintothedarkness, BRUH OKAY, it’s out of pocket, but I respect it.
@@gaveintothedarkness I see what you did there...
@@gaveintothedarknessGOTEEEEEM lmao
Jet powered snowblowers sound like one of those most American things ever.
Don't steal the idea
It does, shame it was the Brits that started using the concept first.
In Russia they also have/used to have truck-mounted jet snowblowers.
Was just about to post this... most other countries you'd be chided for even the suggestion heh heh
Nascar straps these to pickups to dry their race tracks
Jet engines are also used to dry the Indianapolis Speedway track after rain causes the Indy 500 to be stopped. The drying cars have the exhaust of the jet/gas turbine engine directed down into the track. Not only does this blow water away but also evaporates the remaining moisture but also heats up the surface of the track so the tires of the race cars have better traction.
Omg what they don't use this for F1 rainy days?
@@JnManuelAGfor better collision
I seem to recall one caught fire once on the track
@@allanr2697
Entirely possible, the EGT (Exhaust Gas Temperature) is a bit on the high side, and a minor fuel leak could put on quit a show.
Shoutout too my man Pablo Montoya…. He didn’t see em
Me trying to explain to my insurance " yeah i broke my arm and femur from a rock hitting me from a train with a jet engine strapped to the front"
Fuck insurance companies
Humerus story, bro
@@jmcginty96I hate you, but damn that’s a good one. Have a like and get out.
@@juliojonathan8348 I flatter myself that I endeavored to submit a pun even at the expense of an arm and a leg. That they weren’t mine shouldn’t diminish my valor. I simply had a bone to pick with our patron commenter.
@@jmcginty96 your bold statement backed with your assertive action is truly commendable. For that, you earned my utmost respect, and I wish your endeavour be smooth and the destination fruitful.
Snow jets also melts the snow and tend to freeze switches . One yardmaster I worked for didn't want them in his yard. Now they use a special hirail truck that blows unheated air to clear the snow out of switches without melting the snow.
Some air force use it on a wheel and have same issues. Snow splatter in slush form and makes ice chunks hanging everywhere including hanger doors. Horrible stuff.
Just jet blast and set on fire after
In Britain all airports get closed and all railroads stop and all cars go at under 10mpg after 1cm of snow which happens once in a decade.
Yup. We freak out over a single snowflake! Same as a single leaf. It’s comical.
@@laratheplanespotterI had a day off school from an inch an a half of snow. Not that I mind it’s just brits are pussies when it comes to whether
@@laratheplanespotterleaves are dangerous especially on the railways… one thing you don’t just dismiss
You should see what happens here in the American South when even just a dusting is in the forecast.
@@Unb3arablePain don’t fill us in
This snowplough has thrust vectoring capabilities
Apparently they had a heavy lorry with jet engine mounted on it to clear snow on a runway at a British fighter base. A friend based there told me about it. The base was used for the interception of Russian Bear TU95 bombers, so it had to be 24=7-365.
Yup, once again it was EXACTLY what I thought.
*clap...clap...clap*
well it's in the title...
Literally in the title...
Thomas the tank engine has evolved
I see old photo from Czech where they used mig 9 with wings cut off to clean the tracks
The railroad has some of the most unique toys
Santa Pod raceway has one to burn the rubber off the track...
So do some airports. Check out "busy" airports in extreme locations.... like, ya know, Gnome Alaska or something
I can't remember the last time we had snow deep enough to be a concern here in the UK. It has certainly been cold enough each winter, with temperatures regularly falling well below zero, but we have been getting very little snow and what we do get never seems to stick. It saddens me a little, I love the feeling of sitting inside when there's inclement weather, wrapped in a blanket with a hot drink, I have had to make do with holding the increasing number of thunder storms in contempt with a cup of tea.
Same thoughts here. Born in '77, growing up for the most part every winter usually guaranteed several feet of snow. That trend seemed to falter by the late 90s to early 2000s. With the odd exception there has been little snowfall in more recent years and as you point out it doesn't seem to stick anymore. I remember piles of snow cleared from pavements and roads hanging around for weeks as a kid!
The contempt and tea during a thunderstorm comment did make me laugh!
It used to be that busses were the last things running in snow but since they closed the skid pan at Chiswick Works London Transport garage all their vehicles if there's a millimetre of settled snow
Didn't you have huge problems just last winter because of snow?
@@Tupsuu No.
The train with an actual fighter jet just strapped to it is the best one out of all of them
It's called Air Forced One. True story.
Actually no. Air forced One is a cold air blower. The blower is powered by a secondary diesel engine. The other option is jet powered and the jet exhaust is used to blow and melt snow.
Yeah Air Forced One rock into windshield
That first green jet snowblower shown, I heard that one of the New York Central black beetle jet powered train’s jets is now used on that specific model. I am still sad they could not preserve the NYC black beetle, but at least one of its engines are still being used.
Wow I didn’t know this. Fascinating!
🇨🇦 Canada ...hold my case of 2-4! 🍺 🍻 🍺 🍻
That’s crazy. I’m from Phoenix Arizona so I never really dealt with snow and winter conditions. Our winters are 65-70 degrees lol. But I have lived in Boston,New York,Europe and Montreal Canada during a winter and that shit is brutal especially Montreal. It is so cold up there lol
In Canada, a place alot colder than the UK, we use plows, I feel like a hot engine is expensive and kind of alot for some snow lol
it will shift a lot of snow at reasonable speed & will uncover fallen trees with enough time to hit them gently or even stop, thereby minimizing damage to the equipment.
Great work as always! And thank you for crediting your video/image/audio sources in the description! More people need to do that. Please consider including clickable links.
Need this for my driveway
I would imagine back in those days, as jet engines first came out and began to rapidly advance, there were likely a whole bunch of older or obsolete models leftover that no one really knew what to do with.
We used them in the Royal Air Force during the harsh winters back in the 70's. There was a fuel tanker with a rig on the fronts and either one or two engines mounted. With that and a small fleet of Land Rover's , the working party would clear the main runway followed by taxi ways. We kept the Vulcan bombers flying, no matter what.
Glad you mentioned the chicago tracks! Something I was always interested by when pulling into Ogilvie (OTC)
I worked on these when I was with NS. The ones we had were changed over from other equipment and had Rolls Royce jet engines converted to run on diesel. I've blown people down from 80 feet away with these things. And it's great fun to blow the ballast rock all over the place. 😆
And when they directed too much thrust downwards and lifted up the carriage the idea for the harrier was born
Nascar sometimes uses a jet engine to dry the track surface
Why there's a jet engine mounted to a train in the snow was exactly what i thought.
That has to be an awesome job 😊😊😊
Awesome content as always
Lol! Always love seeing metra get emntioned for our on-fire tracks 😂
It cracks me up every winter when it’s on the news. Those switches have gas lines running to them and have burner’s like a gas grill. But people think they are on fire 🤣🤣
In Chicago we literally just light the track junctions on fire via a gas line hooked up to the tracks
The jet blowers are more commonly used to de-ice the plow so the locomotive doesn't have to carry around the extra weight of all of the snow stuck to it
These go right by my house once or twice a year. They are loud!
Holy shit, I want this for my backyard 😂
i remember in wine country in California, they used to use jet engines to keep frost from forming on the grapevines
I was 32yrs old when I found out even a train can hydroplane
blowin off or melting the snow was actually the first thing that came to my mind.
I like how at 0:50 its literally just an undressed mig
that's actually mind blowing
Love how they have an actual MiG, trussed up in a cradle on a car. It looks like the cockpit might even be intact.
I love this channel
They light the rail road tracks on fire to keep them from shrinking to much from the bitter cold 🥶
It wasn’t what I thought
Metal is conductive, yall could really just set them to be 70 degrees and never have a real issue, heated driveways exist.. its 2023 act like it!
That's not quite how it works but some countries heat their switches using electricity.
Back when fuel was a quarter a gallon
Those cause almost as many problems as they solve. The jets blow ice away. They also blow all the ballast away if the operator is not paying attention.
Those ballast stones are pretty well compacted and frozen i wouldn't worry that much about it and if so put a swinging guard of thicker rubber on The sides away from the direct blast of the jet exhaust
It has Thrust Vectoring capabilities 😅
Ah yes this is a good example of my neighbor when he is removing ice AT 2 AM
I work for a railway driving trains. Ive seen one twice in 15 years. Both looked like the yellow one with the nozzle. The first one had FLAMETHROWER written on the side. The second time i saw one it was parked in one spot for a month or two. I pointed it out to every person i worked with and most guys didnt even notice it was a jet engine.
What typically gets used is a big truck with rail gear and some sort of blower motor. Its called "Air Forced One". Google "AF1 EVO" if youre curious.
As a kid I'd go up on the Laramie Avenue Bridge in Cicero, Illinois, USA (which abuts Chicago) and watch the firefly lights of the switch (point) fires on winter evenings.
The rail yard there is HUGE, lots of little fires back then.
Thrust vectoring on a train
GENIUS
Telling your insurance “yeah I just had a rock fly at my car at like 200mph. Some dude with a jet engine blasting stuff at the road”
I love these videos! I do however have one question. How exactly do you know what I think ?
Neighbors living near by won't be needing an alarm to wake up
I saw this years ago and couldn’t find any answer on google no matter how I looked. Thanks for satisfying an old curiosity.
I didn't know this, cool stuff
How inefficient do you want to be?
Yes
My favorite was some Balkan country mounting a klimov VK-1 engine from a MiG-15 to a train
In Soviet Union were similar trucks, based on MAZ 535. They were used to clear plane runways.
That would be good for the Street as well. A Nowplow only pushes snpow away. This makes the road compleatly clean and dry.
Do they even get enough snow in the UK to need blowing? Up in the northern US we'll get several FEET of snow build up every year, and its only very rarely that the tracks need to be plowed, let alone jet-blasted...
For at least 2 hours every year this place is like Aspen!
Yes, the UK used to get A LOT of snow years back. These days not so much, asides the odd harsh winter flurry. We also used to get sustained periods of freezing weather.
P.s. if you've got several FEET of snow on top of a track then trust me, it WILL get plowed. Even if you don't see it happening.
The UK example shown was from 1948, back then there was a _LOT_ of snow.
More recently, every lead locomotive & motor-car has a small plough attached to the front bogie. They're often left in place year-round because they will also clear litter & small tree branches.
Modify them to be more efficient, have them angled even with the tracks rather than blowing down to them, similar technology to eliminate the downside of operating them.
I couldn’t imagine living in a place that gets cold enough to need such a thing 🥶🥶🥶
"A frequent sighting in Chicago" yeah, things on fire.
Could you make a video about the Hungarian big wind firefighter tank? I think it would be very interesting
To be honest it wasn't what I thought... The jet engine powered the whole machine, but seems like the little kid in them prevailed😅😅😅
Australian railways not needing to do anything to thaw their railways:
Interesting to see the snow fly back to the tracks in the reversed clip in the middle 😂
Why worry about it in the first place? Canada just plows it like it’s another Wednesday job.
What happens if too much of the ballast is removed. How much is too much.
the track collapses into the hole & trains are derailed.
an inch is too much on a high speed section
👍Chicago 01/30/2019 I was there. It was cold 🥶, but that's what they did to keep Metra running
The hair dryer the barber of Seville uses:
they used then in my area. i haven't heard it in about 3 years though
For a moment I thought this was a Top Gear invention
Achievement unlocked: thrust vectoring
The Soviets used the TMS-65 (and the Czechoslovak TZ-74) jet engine equipped decontamination vehicles to clear airport runways from snow and ice if in a hurry.
So it's exactly what I thought.
re: setting the junctions on fire, some places (like Metrolinx in Ontario) will use natural gas heaters to keep the switches free of snow/ice
Those track fires shown were a sticky rope like thing what burns for about 30 min.
We also use it to heat up tracks to get them to expand slightly when we need to repair a bolted connector.
The winter of 1947/48 was extremely bad and manu of the railway tracks were in very deep snow. Often six feet or more.
Can I have one for my driveway?
Oh wait, that's the videos going around where people are using their leaf blowers like this, right?
I guess I just do that?
We don't even have trains and they are cleaning tracts with jets... thats an amazing world...
We have one in my yard, never got the chance to run it on my section gangs. To busy doing pull aparts lol
When the flamethrower isn’t enough, the jet engine shall do the job
You know the dudes in the trains have set some lane speed records with those things but tell no one. 😮
It's always exactly what I thought
Wild to think that a train can have thrust vectoring
People should see what nascar did putting a jet engine on a pickup truck
That's been a thing for a long time at UK drag strips as well.
@@skylined5534 the one I saw at Santa Pod decades ago was throttled back because it was picking the truck up
it was EXACTLY what i think.
Cool man
I wonder if you could use high power lasers to melt snow in a similar context. At those kinds of output levels though, light refraction and reflection of and through the snow probably creates a lot of hazards. Would it even work in practical application though? Or would the physical and optical characteristics of snow make it too hazardous to the surroundings or too inefficent to really work? High power lasers are awesome, but they are usually not particularly good for heating air. And snow is commonly 80-90+% air, the rest a bunch of rather reflective ice crystals. Adding to it, water takes a notoriously high amount of energy to force through phase change; it's not just "X joules to heat Y mass of ice to -1°C, 2X heat it to 0°C, 3X heat it to 1°C and now it's also all turned to water". It stays 0°C ice until enough energy has been applied for it to phase change to 0°C water. Same when going from water to ice, only then you need to _extract_ energy from your 0°C Y mass of water, for it to turn into 0°C ice.
Dr Evil snow destruction system.
Good for putting out oil derrick fires as well...😮
You can run the train on the same fuel as the jet because they're both kerosene products. You're also not trying to fly the train. You can also run older cars on avgas. Not recommended for newer vehicles though bc of the lead deposit. The octane is a little higher, but the LL after the number stands for low lead.
Can't imagine why anyone would want to run 100LL in their car unless it was a really old turbo sporty. That stuff is almost twice the cost of 97.
@@captainotto if you're in good with a smaller airport, you can get their "trash fuel"
@@captainotto it's stabilized - you can leave it for months or even years & expect the same performance - relevant for garaged vehicles that only get used a couple of times a year.
In Canada, we just have snow plows... on the train...
Every good thing comes with its own disadvantages 😁😁
This was in fact, the exact reason I thought a jet engine was mounted to the train
Why not a plow that has flamethrowers underneath or maybe even some kind of induction heating system? Seems like it could be a far better solution while being far more efficient.
The main advantage is that it release so much CO2 that it will never snow again 😂