Spotted on NGF this week, as the Polar Vortex hits the USA (the other great headline was ‘Alligators freeze in lake’).

Polar vortex: Fire used to melt ice on Chicago train tracks

Flames from gas-fed heaters are melting away snow and ice at railway intersections in Chicago. It helps to keep the trains running with fewer delays. The US deadly cold snap has caused temperatures in the Illinois city to drop as low as -30C (-22F).

Comments on NGF included:

Nothing new. I can recall wandering round the West Coast Main Line with a hired garden weedkilling flame thrower, melting the ice and snow out of points. When we needed to re-grease them, point the flame at the can of grease to thaw it out, then we could grease the slide chairs. Gave the local Signal And Telegraph people palpitations we were going to burn through their cables! (We never did!)

Pretty standard stuff here, (well not on Vancouver Island.. we don’t get much snow). When I lived in Nova Scotia, the local yard in Dartmouth used a mobile jet engine to melt the ice

They tried the jet engine on UK track and on UK runways…  It stripped the tarmac of the runways.  It fired ballast at high speed an anything in the vicinity.

Still, if we can model sparking pantographs, surely we can model glowing points?