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Nice job Mike Haywood...
...positive story about a person who takes pride in his work. Kudos!
MBTA should be red-faced with shame
This news should make the entire MBTA establishment hang is head in red-faced shame that this wasn't done one, two, three decades ago.
Rather than bruiting the ingenuity and perseverance of one machinist, the MBTA should examine itself and ask why this simple machinist tinkering (common enough in the early 20th century) is so far beyond its capacity?
What has been lost in the culture of the MBTA that makes a swarm of these improvements impossible? What must be done with the MBTA culture to ensure that a culture of inventiveness is commonplace and rewarded?
Are we surprised
that MBTA innovation that would reduce overtime hours and pay, rarely happens?
I'd too would prefer a glorified hair dryer that takes way longer, and not deploy snowblowers (a common solution to snow removal) if it meant that I would get more time and a half.
Can we not spin a postive thing into a negative thing?
The MBTA has generated plenty of news and developments to be disgusted, angry, and sadden. We don't need to take a look at a good thing as a bad thing.
Not to mention you also need to take a little bit of context. Now a disclaimer, I wasn't alive at the time, but I heard that the MBTA used to handle snow pretty well. People use to say how well the T held up against things like the Blizzard of '78. And how the T used tactics like keeping the running the trains through storm where just is going around with its sheer weight was enough.
Basically, from what I heard. Old tactics used to work before - even if they were not optimal, they work enough that no one had complaints and thus no one were looking to innovate and improve. Then two decades of decline and 2015 happened.
Let's save our rage to the next bad news from the T (which probably by the next rush hour).
This wasn't done decades ago
This wasn't done decades ago because nobody had invented such a machine.
Did you read the article, where Mitchell Rail Gear and John Deere were surprised and impressed by Haywood's idea?
So no other community in this
So no other community in this country - or the northern hemisphere - has figured out how to keep light rail tracks free of snow until now?
Read the article
The MBTA was doing "best practices," which is to keep running trains to keep the snow from piling up. Back in 2015, that failed, and as we read here back then, the subway snowplows weren't functioning, partly due to the fact that the guy (that's right, it was one guy) who was able to get them working retired. Another practice is using essentially a large hair drier to blow and melt the snow, but that takes a lot of time (again, as noted in the article.)
Montreal is the closest example in North America of a system that deals with the heaviest of snow, and they are entirely underground.
Remember how unprecedented 2015 was
100" in a month when the city had never seen more than half that. (New-to-the-city friends said last week "wow this is a lot of snow" and I laughed at them. It starts to be a lot of snow when you can't tell whether the cars are snow banks or not. Also 13˚ below normal temperatures (this is many standard deviations). The T had always been able to keep tracks clear by running trains through the snow, so hadn't needed to tinker around with things. It may not have been pretty, but it worked.
Until it didn't.
Sapporo is probably the only city which regularly has that much snow.
Congratulations Mike
Thank you for your service here is your pink slip.
Has this actually happened yet?
Or is this still in the planning stage?