No Snow Left Behind
Applications Innovations
by Mike Anderson
Speed the Plow
he numbers just didn’t add up for Bob Lannert back in his days with the Missouri DOT: There were too few plow trucks to clear snow and ice from the newly-added lanes of highway his crew was responsible for.
Albeit a problem neither uncommon nor new to his DOT colleagues throughout the country of course, Lannert did have a solution in mind – one that has recently been brought to market by snow equipment manufacturer Viking-Cives (www.vikingcives.com) and generated additional traction for the revolutionary Lannert himself. The TowPLow, as Lannert spells and designates it, “became a solution to the problem of the many additional lanes built in Kansas City and St. Louis when state government did not want to add additional staff to their ranks,” he recalls. “My initial goal was to solve having to gang the many plow trucks to clear three to seven lanes in one direction from the barrier to beyond the right shoulder. The problem was: When the gangs were
34 August 2010 Better Roads
gathered, the other routes were often not being plowed.” This coming winter, MoDOT alone will operate more than 60 of the towable plowing units, says Lannert, who is now retired from MoDOT after 34 years and, among his endeavors (www.TowPLow. com), consults with Viking-Cives, manufacturer of the TP26. So designated due to its total 26-foot moldboard length, the TP26 “is our biggest success story in innovation,” says Gerald Simpson, vice president, sales, with Viking-Cives Ltd., the Mount Forest, Ontario-based Canadian division of the international company. Lannert, during an evening dinner when visiting the Ontario plant a number of years ago, drew the idea on a table napkin, showing how a plowing trailer, equipped with steering
axles, could hydraulically steer out to the side. This would allow two lanes to be cleared at once with a single plow truck. Starting five years ago and supported by Canada’s Industrial Research Assistance Program based on federal, provincial and local employment opportunities, the Canadian arm of Viking-Cives has now essentially completed the TP26 program, save for a few “tweaks”, and has been marketing the product for two years now, says Simpson. “At the end of last snow season, we had approximately 75 of them working across North America,” he says, citing such diverse markets as Missouri, Minnesota, Utah, Maine, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and the Canadian provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Alberta. “Almost everyone who has bought one came back and bought more. They didn’t park them in the corner and say, ‘Well, it was a novelty, and it was cute, and it was nice, but it doesn’t work for us. Almost everyone has bought more. We’ll have 100 working