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Due to local adverse weather the police have closed access to Newark Showground.

Therefore Hammerhead has been re-scheduled for 28th April 2018.

Please share.

It's a shame, but on the sliver-lining side, it means I can attend now, as the original date I had something on.

I don't get it, we have never had our roads closed down here and we've had 2 feet of snow fall in a single night.
Never heard of schools or anything getting closed due to snow.
From pictures I've seen there is hardly any snow at all in the UK atm? What am I missing? Pic at the top of this thread is just pathetic, that would be considered a snow free area here as there is hardly any snow at all in the picture.

You probably have snow tyres and experience though.

We’ve had 2 or 3 nominal amounts of snow in Sorthern/central UK in the last two decades and a culture of risk avoidance. People just don’t know what to do and are told not to travel unless vital. It does hiweve save live being lost unnecessarily.

I do however agree with you.

Hah! you don`t live in the UK! Half an inch of snow and its an apocalypse.
When we brits say snow, what we mean really is a light dusting of slighty frosty water, unlike our europeanh cousins who acutally need to know how to use a snowplough.

It's almost as if countries that regularly experience adverse weather conditions and have both civil strategies and individual knowledge for dealing with them are better able to deal with said conditions than countries that only experience them so occasionally that such levels of preparation aren't cost effective

I'm only about an hours drive away from Newark and the conditions are "changeable". Some areas look fine with just a light dusting, while half a mile up the road you have drifting snow that's burying cars and winds blowing HGV's into ditches. So this sounds like the right move to me.

They're not the only ones having problems with the snow...

Yodhrin wrote:It's almost as if countries that regularly experience adverse weather conditions and have both civil strategies and individual knowledge for dealing with them are better able to deal with said conditions than countries that only experience them so occasionally that such levels of preparation aren't cost effective

What is this reasonable sanity and logic!? Don't let the TV news crews find your name least they have you removed before this calm logic spreads!

GoatboyBeta wrote:I'm only about an hours drive away from Newark and the conditions are "changeable". Some areas look fine with just a light dusting, while half a mile up the road you have drifting snow that's burying cars and winds blowing HGV's into ditches. So this sounds like the right move to me.

This is a big part of it; the road itself might be ok for the most part, but there will be a segment where its got thick ice or blown snow that makes it dangerous to impassable for most drivers and vehicles. The changing nature is also an issue, what is a dodgy/tricky road now can be impassable in a few hours.

Of course most of us are thinking this will mostly be over by end of next week. At least the forecast has the temperatures going back up by Monday

 Yodhrin wrote:
It's almost as if countries that regularly experience adverse weather conditions

Define 'regularly'. Here, winters are sort of thing of the past, too, given warming up of last decade (we get snow like 2-3 times a winter, tops, then it melts in less than a week and we're back to cold autumn conditions) yet all you need to get by is a set of winter tyres (or all-rounders, getting more and more popular thanks to actual winter being rare) instead of trying to drive on summers like last idiot and expecting it to work somehow. Perhaps if UK police actually started mandating using correct ones instead of just lazily closing roads the situation would improve?

I have experience on both continental and UK roads and I'm kinda surprised with these issues as Glasgow area was actually colder than my home town, and you generally drive slower in UK (had anyone tried putting up UK signs like 'twenty's plenty' here we'd see actual lynch) so I'd have actually expect Brits to have less, not more problems. For comparison, here's how roads here looked two days ago, with the arrival of siberian cold air front, and as you can see people manage just fine, nothing needed to be closed:

When I was a kid we got snow in November, December and it melted in Jan. Nowdays we don't get snow until Jan or Feb and it lasts til April.

I remember scientists saying we would get shorter summers and longer & colder winters due to global warming pushing the golf stream down so we no longer get warm water into the Baltic sea.
I can pretty much confirm this from just living here for the past 37 years.

we get snow like 2-3 times a winter, tops, then it melts in less than a week and we're back to cold autumn conditions

We get snow every 2-3 winters, tops, then it melts in less than an afternoon and we're back to mild autumn conditions.

I'm not even exaggerating to fit the structure of your sentence. What we're currently experiencing is the worst winter conditions in decades for some parts of the country.

Oh yes, if it ever really snowed here in Lisbon, it would be mass chaos. We have absolutely 0 experience with snow, except for those who actually live up North and there's already a big change in traffic when it rains; snow, the city would just stop.

Anyway, it's better to be safe then sorry.

Here in Japan parts of the country regularly get 7 or inches of snow but half an inch in Tokyo is enough to send the city grinding to halt. It always amazes me that that they don't do whatever Sapporo does to survive the winter.
At the moment it looks like the GW aos open day is in danger of bring cancelled which would be a bit of a bummer.

Chikout wrote:
Here in Japan parts of the country regularly get 7 or inches of snow but half an inch in Tokyo is enough to send the city grinding to halt. It always amazes me that that they don't do whatever Sapporo does to survive the winter.
At the moment it looks like the GW aos open day is in danger of bring cancelled which would be a bit of a bummer.

They don't do it because it's a matter of cost vs benefit. Like, the UK experiences this kind of event maybe every couple of years at most, usually only over one part of the country and not in any way always the same part. To make every area that might be hit by the right combination of black or snow-covered ice, drifting snow, and high winds to make road travel dangerous maybe every few years suitably prepared to deal with it would cost a fortune in equipment that would spend 98.5% of the time sitting in a warehouse doing nothing, and the training to use it is an additional expense. Fact is it's cheaper and easier to just occasionally say "don't travel for the next couple of days" and live with the consequences. The same rationale applies to individuals - sure, you could go out and buy winter tyres, but is the cost worth it for a couple of days every few years? Is even the effort of changing them just to change them back a day or two later worth it? Most folk will say no.

To illustrate Yodhrin's point, the County Council here in Devon got to send out their "new" snow blowers for the first time yesterday to clear some of the roads on Dartmoor. I say "new" because I believe they said they were 6 years old, certainly several years old, and they hadn't previously had any reason to use them, despite having Exmoor and Dartmoor within the territory, which contain some of the highest points in the South of the country and that do receive at least some snowfall most years.

Last year in this same area I'm in we got perhaps a handful of days when it was icy conditions (the worst of which was when it was raining at midnight and then fast froze in the early morning). We possibly got a morning of snow (ergo it fell and was mostly melted by midday/afternoon). So snow-tyres would have been worth it for perhaps a handful of days at most.

And added to that is the fact that you likely won't know you need them until you need them, so that would mean running those tyres on normal roads the whole winter rather than on roads they are designed (snowy/icey) to run on.

And if you've got gear that is laying up in storage that's not only money in limbo; but also a risk that the gear will

a) Be damaged from lack of use or damage to storage resulting in gear damage (and likely as not you won't find the rat nest moved into the container until you go to get the unit out when you need it)

b) Lack of training on staff. Heck after a few years the staff member who IS highly trained might well move on; leaving you less experienced staff.

c) Technology moves on in a big way leaving you with unused old gear.

d) Lack of experience of use. Even if you've had the training course that's nothing to using gear in the real world. Even something like driving on ice is a big risk if you've only done it once when training.
More higher tech gear might well cause other issues. Eg snow blowers you might have staff blow the snow in the wrong direction or not take account of the damage large bodies of snow can cause - might even be simple things like having a person or vehicle or such trail-blaze ahead to avoid trapped and buried cars/debries causing further damage/risk/injury etc...

 MadCowCrazy wrote:
I don't get it, we have never had our roads closed down here and we've had 2 feet of snow fall in a single night.
Never heard of schools or anything getting closed due to snow.
From pictures I've seen there is hardly any snow at all in the UK atm? What am I missing? Pic at the top of this thread is just pathetic, that would be considered a snow free area here as there is hardly any snow at all in the picture.

That picture is also very unrepresentative of the conditions for much of the UK. I'm in Haslemere in the South East and up until yesterday we had basically no snow, which made us unusual, then, in the space of a few hours, it was up to my ankles when it came time to walk home from work. It was actually easier to walk than drive, there's a lot of non-main roads that aren't being gritted/cleared effectively and even on those that are, it's too cold for the grit to actually be effective. Plenty of of them are now coated in slush/ice/compacted snow.

This is very atypical weather for us and our travel infrastructure isn't set up for it. Waterloo - Portsmouth train line has massive disruption due to the 3rd rail freezing and yesterday there were delays as the cold was causing signal failures.

Where I live we're getting our first snow for 5 YEARS! And it will probably be gone by Monday. May as well shutdown for a few days.

 Yodhrin wrote:

Chikout wrote:
Here in Japan parts of the country regularly get 7 or inches of snow but half an inch in Tokyo is enough to send the city grinding to halt. It always amazes me that that they don't do whatever Sapporo does to survive the winter.
At the moment it looks like the GW aos open day is in danger of bring cancelled which would be a bit of a bummer.

They don't do it because it's a matter of cost vs benefit. Like, the UK experiences this kind of event maybe every couple of years at most, usually only over one part of the country and not in any way always the same part. To make every area that might be hit by the right combination of black or snow-covered ice, drifting snow, and high winds to make road travel dangerous maybe every few years suitably prepared to deal with it would cost a fortune in equipment that would spend 98.5% of the time sitting in a warehouse doing nothing, and the training to use it is an additional expense. Fact is it's cheaper and easier to just occasionally say "don't travel for the next couple of days" and live with the consequences. The same rationale applies to individuals - sure, you could go out and buy winter tyres, but is the cost worth it for a couple of days every few years? Is even the effort of changing them just to change them back a day or two later worth it? Most folk will say no.

To add to that, my understanding is that in Sweden, storage of unused winter wheels is a service that is provided. In the UK, that's not available, so people would need to find somewhere to store four tyres at all times; not an insignificant inconvenience.

We do cope with the rain well though, just shrug our shoulders, put up a brolly and get on with it.