Snow -

[Nick Armstrong]

Great bit of work by Edinburgh bus driver.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-43255368

Terrific driving

Giving a new meaning to the phrase «snow drift»....

[Dave2002]

It's difficult indeed.

Sometimes in icy conditions things seem to happen very fast, or even very slowly - depending on your perception.
I had a near miss with a bus in California in the mountains in icy conditions. Our car started on the right (yes it was the right ..) side of the road going into a bend. I think I just touched the brake slightly to slow it down, and the car went almost immediately to the other side (wrong!) of the road, and as it did so I saw a bus coming round the bend the other way. I could see the driver quite clearly, but I did frantic manoevres with the steering wheel and cleared the bus, which carried on down the road. Alternative routes off that road were not advisable, and near vertical downwards. I think we were only a second or so from a head on collision. Maybe in a parallel universe we are all dead.

[cloughie]

Difficult to judge, but she seemed to be going faster than I would have expected.

Very little snow here, but cold and windy. Just a few miles away the M62 is closed indefinitely on the trans-Pennine section.

Wasn't that the road which was never going to close?

[Once Was 4]

Wasn't that the road which was never going to close?

Hmm! Now I can admit it. Several years ago I was driving back from a show at the Manchester Palace Theatre (I had two passengers - one who lives near to me and one whose wife was waiting to pick him up in the car park of Harry Ramsden's at Guiseley). It was snowing hard and about 11.00 in the evening. The traffic came to a dead stop up Windy Hill and somehow had got marshalled in three lanes of which I was right at the front of one. Somebody waved me on with a torch (honest guv') and we gingerly kept going over the hill and back into God's own county; one of my passengers remarked that there was only one other car to be seen going in the same direction. We kept going through Bradford, into the Aire Valley and up to Guiseley just in time to see my colleague's wife driving off so we followed her and she eventually noticed that it was us and stopped - telling us that a policeman had told her that the M62 was shut.
The next morning we drove back to Manchester for a 10.30 rehearsal to be told that everybody else had been turned back by the police and had had to find accommodation in Manchester. I have often wondered about this.
Mind you, all professional musicians can tell similar tales. I had to abandon my car once (in Buxton) - getting home mainly by train and, for the last two and a half miles, on foot. And once I did not try to get home (from Blackpool - for years afterwards I got a free pen from the hotel which I found). Twice I turned up late for a show (once in Nottingham and once in Wolverhampton) and neither time was I the last. And once I set off for a show in Leeds at 4.00pm, arrived there at 9.00pm only to be told "you should not have turned out - they cancelled half an hour after the curtain should have gone up as there was an audience of about ten and a company of about twenty - now we have to try and get home again" - we made it by the way). And yes, I admit it, once we were doing a symphony concert, got fed up of trying to get to the rehearsal, stopped at a pub and rang to say that we were stuck in a snowdrift and would try and get there for the concert which, of course, we did)
I was lucky - one trumpet player once got stuck on the M62 overnight and had to be fed breakfast in his car by the police.