Trains, horses, guns, and those wacky Canadians

[dmaze]

The cover article from this month's Trains magazine is about snow-clearing efforts in eastern British Columbia by the Canadian Pacific. That's fine, every couple of months there's an article about some rail line crossing the Rockies or Sierras or Appalachians, and it's a 2% grade for 50 miles, and a third of that is in tunnels and a third in snow sheds, and it snows, and they clear it, except when they don't. Sure. This was reading like a pretty typical Trains article, complete with narrative about a cab ride, until I got to:

Since the completion of the Trans-Canada Highway through Rogers Pass in the 1960s, the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery has aimed 105 mm cannons at developing avalanches....

Not exactly the usual subject matter.

Comments

[eisenbud.livejournal.com]

"Avy bombing" is pretty common out west, for both roads and avalanche-prone ski slopes. Route 88 in the Sierras is routinely closed for avalanche control of this sort when there's a big snow.

[fredrickegerman.livejournal.com]

Yup, definitely heard of this before. They do it in Switzerland and the Sierras for sure.