What Landies are made for.......

Oh I like the last picture

"It was not just wind and rain which caused problems - snow at Tow Law in County Durham caused this car to crash off the side of the road."

Snow did NOT cause the car to crash, the idiot behind the wheel did.

Alex

it takes a lot of british rail workers to clear one small tree off the line!

You're not joking, I was sat on a train in Manchester waiting to go to the Capital, gave up and went home after 2 hrs.

Martin

That was my thought as well. Not to mention it's a straight road FFS.

I doubt any of them are british rail workers. That organisation doesn't exist anymore. Much more likely to be private sub-contractors to Rail Track. Even so there did seem to be rather a lot of 'em. I'd have thought a team of 6 or so could have done it. It is an overhead electrified line so there is more to it than just getting a chainsaw out hacking the tree into bits and checking the track for damage.

In news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com, Tom Woods wibbled :

Yea, wrong sort of trees?

Does Rail Track exist any more, think their name this week is Network Rail, although you could be forgiven for thinking it was mud!

technically speaking, BR still exists

My cousin just sent me this link:-

Ouch!

ok so what ##should## you do if you encounter conditions like that or is the inevitable going to happen?

RichardB

They look almost graceful sliding around.. its like car pinball! :)

If you get on a road like that i'd say dont just jump on the brakes like most of those people seemed to be doing - but i dont think that there is a lot you can do. When we had the incident round here where the gritters didnt do anything and it iced up i got caught on one bit and slid probably around half a mile down a hill.. It is very scary just sliding along! (i missed all the obstacles including a roundabout somehow too!)

Reminds me of when the A303 iced up so bad I was stuck on it for 4 hours last winter, I was in the Audi unfortunately. While trudging slowly forward, on another road I'd seen a line of cars at the top of a hill watch as the first car went down the hill, skidding out of control. Once the first one had slowly crashed to a halt at the bottom, the next one tentatively decided to have a go and did the same thing strangely enough. I didn't see if the rest followed.

Cars are so dumb, sometimes I wonder why we don't put human controllers inside them!

Yep, I love the one slowly sliding broadside on and accelerating...

Even that would be fun in a two wheel drive motor, the no drven end would have a mind of it's own and want to go down hill all the time.

That may look like snow and it is snowing lightly but I think that the snow is just a covering over sheet ice. I don't mean a heavy frost sort of ice mean smooth solid ice as in ice rink. This forms when cold or super cooled, rain falls onto cold ground freezing pretty much on impact. Everything gets caked in solid ice. Doesn't happen very often in this country but parts of the US have been hit pretty hard by it in the last week or so.

Walk

Alex

On or around Sat, 20 Jan 2007 23:25:41 +0000, Alex enlightened us thusly:

ice skates.

Tea tray!

|| On 2007-01-21, Austin Shackles || wrote: || |||| Walk ||| ||| ice skates. || || Tea tray!

Ferty Bag!

|| That may look like snow and it is snowing lightly but I think that || the snow is just a covering over sheet ice. I don't mean a heavy || frost sort of ice mean smooth solid ice as in ice rink.

You're right. Compared to that, snow is easy to drive on. With ice like that, you're in the lap of the Gods, and playing to the rules of pinball rather than the Highway Code.

Get the camcorder out :)