"So when she begins to blizz, we just fall back on our roundhouses, that's all. We cut our local freights down to 1500 tons, then to 1200, 900, 600, rather than send them into shelter. We tackle our through freights in a like proportion and while we are cutting off cars, we are adding power. Everything that goes out of this yard will be double-headed as long as there is danger in the air. There will be two engines to a passenger-train and ahead of each a rotary, with two or three locomotives to push her. You see the value of reserve motive-power, don't you? Why we have half-a-dozen extra engines trying to gather rust over there in the roundhouse. They're worth their weight in gold in a pinch of this sort, though when they're done with a week of snow fighting, they're fit candidates for the shops." A rotary plough has no powers of self-propulsion, but the mighty engine within her heart, driving the shaft of her great cutting-wheel has the power of three locomotives. That cutting-wheel approximates the width of a single-track in diameter. It will bore into a solidly packed drift, twelve or sixteen feet in height, suck in a great volume of snow, and then throw it--as a fire engine throws water--through a nozzle 60 to 100 feet to the right or left of the line. The nozzle is close to three feet in diameter, and the stream that it throws will bury a small barn. The man who sits in the lookout of the rotary controls the nozzle, changes it from side to side so as to avoid buildings. These rotaries are giants. Where the great flange or wing ploughs--the ordinary snow-fighting artillery of a railroad--fail, they come into service. Theirs is ever a mighty task to perform. We have seen a rotary spend sixty minutes in going sixty feet through a heavy drift, a drift three miles long and twenty deep. Snow can drift, and wet snow can pack, pack until you almost begin to think of dynamite as a resource. Three days of such snow-fighting would completely weary the ordinary man. Up in the snow-belts, they are likely to get a hard storm every week from December to March, and that atop of the heaviest traffic of the year. It is the sort of fighting that marks the fine-grained timber of a man; that sends him down to headquarters in some metropolitan city along the seaboard, to fight the weightier battles of traffic and of operation, which are unending within and between the mighty railroads of America.