Speed the plow

New tow plow moves more snow, faster

By Mike Anderson

The 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 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.

Designated the TP26, the initial trailer-mounted tow plow model manufactured by Viking-Cives is designed to tow behind and work alongside a truck with a standard plow mounted on the front. This combination can increase the single unit’s clearing path to 25 feet. The primary use is multi-lane, high-speed echelon plowing, in which the TowPLow concept by innovator Bob Lannert will allow one truck to effectively do the work of two.

“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 when the snow season starts again in the 10/11 winter.”

Key features of theTP26 include two 18,000-pound steering axles capable of turning 30 degrees and two 30-inch-high moldboards pinned together that are raised and lowered by two 3-inch-by-16-inch cylinders. The front moldboard is 12 feet long, the rear is 14 feet long, and both operate from a single acting valve section controlled from the truck’s cab.

“It takes one length of the machine to fully deploy,” Simpson explained during an on-site demo for Better Roads, “and it doesn’t matter if you’re going one mile per hour or 50. It’s how far it travels, which with the plow on it is approximately 65 to 70 feet, depending on the truck model.”