#snowploughs

[feigeroman]

Saturday Movie Night: Snowdrift At Bleath Gill (1955)

On February 24th 1955, while hauling a goods train between Bishop Auckland and Kirkby Stephen, BR Standard 2 #78018 found herself stuck in heavy drifts of snow just below Stainmore Summit. Engines with snowploughs were dispatched to dig her out, but the snow turned out to be so bad that they found themselves stuck. So began five arduous days and nights of digging, ploughing and thawing - compressed for our benefit into just ten minutes, in what has become one of BTF's most iconic productions

[icedsodapop]

[scavengedluxury]

BHÉV snowplough, Cinkota depot, 1932. From the Budapest Municipal Photography Company archive.

[snooziep]

[lomotunes2008]

Someone's grumpy

[putuponpercy]

I bet Thomas has successfully managed to convince Cranky to yeet his snowplough into the ocean at least once

[retrocgads]

UK 1987

[mysharona1987]

But this headline reads like Jeremy Renner regrets saving his nephew in sad snowplough accident.

Which is not true. It’s the opposite.

But that poor nephew.

His villain origin story.

[shadowsandstarlight]

Local man with chronic pain has just shovelled snow off of entire very large back deck solo. Whole thing was covered in 6 inches to a FOOT of snow. I love Canada. This all showed up literally overnight, by the way, the deck was completely snow-free before yesterday afternoon.

[shyyysstuff]

:/

[misforgotten2]

“Let it snow, let it snow, let it-- **bbrrrrzzzttt** Whoa! I sure hope that wasn’t another cat.”

Our Wonderful World   1969, 1961, 1960, 1959, 1951    

[feigeroman]

Saturday Movie Night: Snow (1963)

WARNING: The editing of the footage gradually speeds up over the course of the film, and the last 2-3 minutes contain several flash frames and flashing images. If you are at all prone to seizures and/or sensory overload, I would strongly suggest stopping the video at the 6:00 mark, if not giving it a miss entirely.

With Christmas just around the corner, I thought I'd treat you to something suitably wintry this week. During the bitter winter of 1962/63, director Geoffrey Jones was busy doing field research for a BTF production about design. Reviewing his test footage, he was struck by several stunning images of dark steam trains chruning across snowy white backdrops, and this inspired him to put forward an idea for a different film - contrasting the comfort of the passengers against the Herculean efforts of the staff to keep the trains running.

Jones' idea was given the green light, and he was immediately sent off with cameraman Wolfgang Suschitzky (later of Ring of Bright Water and get Carter fame) to shoot as much as he could before the cold snap came to an end. The footage they shot was supplemented by some of Jones' original 16mm test footage, and the odd snippet from the BTF archive (most notably 1955's Snowdrift At Bleath Gill). This was then all cut, in Jones' signature style, to a cover of Sandy Nelson's Teen Beat, arranged by Johnny Hawksworth and Daphne Oram.

[lizalfosrise]

Oh I’m gonna have to be so so brave when WhatTheF.. drops ughhh

[steam-beasts]

Do engines still use snowplows? Or do they just push snow aside with their arms/paws? If so, I bet Thomas would feel happy for not wearing it lol

To start off, I find it a little tricky to explain, but the engines can kinda switch forms, so they can have wheels or legs at will. I draw them rarely in their wheel forms since I just generally find it hard to draw perfect circles 😭

Answering your question: yes, they still require snowploughs lol. Thomas is so mad about it.

(I hate how big his forehead is smh)

[checkoutmybookshelf]

You Have My Attention: Discworld's Death Books' First Lines

The wonderful Sir Terry Pratchett needs no introduction. Introductions do help with books, though, so let's see how the five Death books catch their readers from their very first lines.

This is the bright candlelit room where the lifetimes are stored - shelf upon shelf of them, squat hourglasses, one for every living person. pouring their fine sand from the future into the past. The accumulated hiss of the falling grains makes the room roar like the sea. This is the owner of the room, stalking though it with a preoccupied air. His name is Death.

-- Mort

The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse. It is danced under blue skies to celebrate the quickening of the soil and under bare stars because it's springtime and with any luck the carbon dioxide will unfreeze again. The imperative is felt by deep-sea being who have never seen the sun and urban humans whose only connection with the cycle of nature is that their Volvo once ran over a sheep.

-- Reaper Man

Where to finish? A dark, stormy night. A coach, horses gone, plunging through the rickety, useless fence and dropping, tumbling into the gorge below. It doesn't even strike an outcrop of rock before it hits the dried riverbed far below, and erupts into fragments.

-- Soul Music

Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree. But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things. They wonder aloud how the snowplough driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of the words. Yet there is the constant desire to find some point in the twisting, knotting, ravelling nets of spacetime on which a metaphorical finger can be put to indicate that here, here, is the point where it all began...

-- Hogfather

According to the First Scroll of Wen the Eternally Surprised, Wen stepped out of the cave where he had received enlightenment and into the dawning light of the first day of the rest of his life. He stared at the rising sun for some time, because he had never seen it before.

-- Thief of Time

[katzenprinz]

More Say Nothing extras!!

This time a rundown of our beloved team’s callsigns.

So, for Salim and Jason, we address theirs and explain them in the fic. We chose Buffy for Salim for obvious reasons and Sweet Tea for Jason because it’s such a Southern American staple. (And delicious!)

We explained Nick being Sommersault in the fic, too. The way he dives into that roll to pick up Joey in the firefight, that man has absolutely pulled moves like that before.

Now, for the Goslings~

Palmer is “Casper” because he sees ghosts. Even though he stated in the fic that most ghosts are angry, if not outright malicious, and Casper is a friendly ghost, it just fit. Palmer has definitely been the most friendly of the Goslings toward Salim, after all, due to him admiring Salim a lot.

Elliott is “Broadway” since he loves his showtunes. We like to imagine that Rana has been subjected to Elliott softly singing through entire musicals while he helps her in the artifact room. And this boy absolutely sings in the shower. ALSO, extra fun fact: he is named after TS Eliot, who wrote the poems which were adapted into the music for CATS~

Mosson is “Dipper” because ????????? Ask Gabe.

And then there is Jones, who was dubbed “Moose” due to him being from Alaska. He probably told the Goslings about having plenty of run-ins with dangerous animals after him comment about the sling they used to airlift the vampire out for SOCOM, and the Goslings pounced on the fact that Jones has seen a lot of moose. He is also the largest member of the team, both in height and muscle.

We also gave Dr. Kim the callsign “Snowplough” because we decided that she is from a very snowy area of Colorado and really enjoys spending her time out in the winter weather.

Rana does not yet have a callsign, but she may get one in a future chapter!!