Highway 490 around Rochester, New York was absolutely inundated with snow this week with everything from buses to big rigs getting stuck and stopping plows. As we always love to see; some good samaritans went above and beyond their truck’s tow rating to get people going again.
Chris Johnson, identified on this Time Warner News broadcast as a local welder, apparently hooked his diesel Ford F-250 to a few vehicles to pull them out of bogs—including this Freightliner big rig and its trailer, which the Power Stroke-powered pickup truck seemed to actually extract pretty easily.
You can skip straight to 01:10 if you want to see the pull but bypass all the great commentary local news so loves to deliver; (“What’s it like being stuck out here in traffic?”).
If that big rig were loaded, it could have weighted close to 80,000 pounds. The Ford looks to be about 15 years old, which means it probably would have weighed around 6,000 pounds been rated to tow 12,500 pounds or less.
Of course whether it was built before or after 2003 would make a big difference; that year, the truck switched from a 7.3-liter engine to a 6.0 with about 100 more horsepower. Both Ford diesel engines were made by International.
But whatever. I think we all understand that the important takeaway here is: smaller truck pulling bigger truck always equals awesome. I might not try this too many times, though. New York state road salt would have been hard on that pickup’s frame in the last 10-plus years.
Contact the author at andrew@jalopnik.com.