Talk:The wrong type of snow

Early comments

Is this saying still used today? Alex (t) 22:47, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

Yes. Widely? Don't know. I use it, of course. Just zis Guy you know? 22:57, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

• Right now, the article is a bit sparse, and WP:NOT for definitions. I suppose it might be expandable, but the article name is a bit vague. Perhaps merge with Rail transport in Great Britain? (I've category-tagged it for now.) --Alan Au 07:48, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

I've rewritten it with a bit of background. Hope this helps! -- Goose 18:53, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Date of first use

The current article quotes 1991, but I am sure I remember it from the 1980s, although I have not yet found a source to confirm this.

I remember hearing and readin about his lame excuse when it happened, and it was definitely the nineties (I'd moved to the home counties by then, and that's where I remember it from). Totnesmartin (talk) 16:38, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Testing

My recollection of the story is that British Rail (BR) had done a risk assessment and decided that this type of snow was so rare in the UK that it didn't justify the expense of shipping engines to Switzerland to carry out the tests. Of course the media criticized this decision, but they had the benefit of hindsight. In this particular instance I think BR was unlucky rather than incompetent, and the criticism was a little unfair, but it was a good joke against BR which most people enjoyed at the time. There was a political agenda for attacking BR at that time: BR was already widely regarded as incompetent, and big business was already looking forward to the profitable opportunities of rail privatization. Now that we have the privatized rail companies to compare with, BR doesn't seem quite so bad after all, does it? From a historical perspective, BR certainly had many faults, but that doesn't mean everything they did was wrong, and I think portraying BR as incompetent in this particular example is POV. (Not sure how much of this I can put into the main article, unless I can find contemporary or more recent sources.) --RichardVeryard (talk) 03:33, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

This would be a good addition to this article, if you can source it. I don't think it is unreasonable to put as many (verifiable) pro-BR facts in here as we can, to counter the inherent anti-BR stance of the media bandwagon.

EdJogg (talk) 23:03, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Just in case anyone is interested, here is the real background. When railway locomotives are designed, they are tested to ensure that they are able to operate in various kinds of conditions. One of these is snow. However, it is impossible to depend on having access to "real" snow, because the design workshop might be located in an area where there is no snowy weather, or it might be the wrong time of the year. Accordingly, the design workshops have access to equipment that can "make" snow by freezing water vapour (a bit like is used in certain indoor ski slopes, and so on). What the non-scientific public and their non-scientific media failed to grasp here is that there IS in fact various "types" of snow. Depending on the conditions, snow can form with flakes of different sizes, different shapes, and different crystal packing densities. Each of these types of snow behaves slightly differently (you may have heard people speaking about the snow being "not very good for skiing" - once again, this is the result of a different physical form of snow). Testing locomotives on the "man made" snow allows a reasonable picture to be gained as to how they might cope in snowy conditions, but as it is impossible to create "man made" snow that is identical to all of the various naturally occurring forms, it doesn't give you a 100% accurate one. Hence, the British Rail locos may have performed OK in tests using "man made" snow, but less well in certain other naturally occurring types. This, of course, could have been explained at the time, but it would have been less of a story for a media that is more concerned with satisfying a baying public than giving facts. It also gave the public much ammunition to finger point and jeer, rather than actually understand the problem (not that many would have been genuinely interested anyway). StanPomeray (talk) 12:15, 10 October 2014 (UTC)

Doesn't Make Sense

Too shallow for ploughs to be of use? From someone who has lived in Canada all her life, that doesn't make any sense. The article as a whole reads like it was written, well, by someone from a place like Britain, where snow is a rare sight. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.51.169.43 (talk) 02:13, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure what your point is. Snowfall is extremely rare in many parts of Britain, and a light fall can still cause problems. Snow is so rare that the expense of specialised snow-clearing equipment is hard to justify. Presumably in this case the snow wasn't deeper on the rails than the clearance gap beneath the plough. -- EdJogg (talk) 15:59, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

The snow wasn't too shallow. If anything it was too deep. Either the source has been misquoted or the author was just plain wrong. Southern England normally experiences relatively small amounts of wet slushy snow that can be cleared using solid metal plate type snow ploughs. That time there was a huge dump of light fluffy snow. Whilst the snow ploughs cleared it, the snow simply flowed back again - it was like clearing water with a spade. The big snow blowers were sited in Scotland where fluffy snow is common. With a maximum speed of 30 kph and 800 km to travel, it took a long time to get them in place.OrewaTel (talk) 20:07, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

I've found the cited reference which states, "... caused by dry and powdery snow falling in considerable volume ..." It seems there is a variance between Wikipedia and both the cited source and the facts. I shall edit the Wikipedia article which will make this section on the talk page puzzling for future reviewers.OrewaTel (talk) 20:23, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

Snow causes similar US Locomotive Failures in 1958 and 1978

This is related but may not fit best here.

The Pennsylvania Railroad GG1 Locomotives suffered a similar type of failure. Similarly, the comment was:

Said one Pennsy executive: "We were prepared for cornflakes, but we got hit by talcum powder."

As detailed in these articles in Time magazine and the New York Times the same solution, finding and using other locomotives, was used until fixes could be applied. Similarly, Budd Metroliners had to be reworked

in order to alleviate problems with blowing snow getting into the workings.

Interestly, the fix in both cases involved changing the air intakes to the top of locomotive/car. Ironically, the twenty years after being fixed, the GG1's were towing the Metroliners after a snowstorm.--Lent (talk) 21:25, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

Notability

Article makes a WP:NEO claim: "the phrase became a byword for euphemistic and pointless excuses" that it fails to support, nor does a quick google - although it should have if this is a "byword" for anything. As a joke about the troubles snow can cause, the phrase was certainly used. The hits I get on a gBooks search are all about actual snow. It may be time to revisit notability. Or perhaps redirect this to British Rail.E.M.Gregory (talk) 14:31, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

A neologism tends to suggest a recently coined phrase (neo meaning "new") - "The wrong type of snow" has been in common parlance since 1991. Hardly a neologism if it's been in use for 26 years. This phrase is widely used in Britain - if the article doesn't currently support that, then the issue is citations, not notability.Cnbrb (talk) 20:11, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

....to which end I have added some more scholarly citations which support the phrase's significance in British culture and linguistics. Seem better now? 16:17, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

Excellent, well, I'll infer approval from the lack of response. Glad that's sorted out. Cnbrb (talk) 12:40, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

sputnik ref

The website sputniknews is blacklisted as a Russian propaganda site, but this ref Восток - дело тонкое: почему "Белое солнце пустыни" цитируют по сей день is a neutral cultural/linguistic source, useful for future references. I am just lazy to go through the "unblaklist" procedure, maybe later. - Altenmann >talk 18:24, 14 December 2023 (UTC)