Brian Dobson's yellow and scarlet army sat waiting on its Yorkshire hilltop yesterday, plugged into scores of satellite links, windspeed gauges and thermal monitors buried in the tarmac of the M62.
Bleeped messages from Britain's highest stretch of motorway, the bleak 372-metre (1,221ft) Pennine summit of Windy Hill, alternated with data from rare almost-warm stretches of northern road - a built-up mile of the A1M near Doncaster, a stretch past Immingham's oil terminals on the Humber.
"We've 784 miles of road to grit or plough," says Mr Dobson, route manager in Yorkshire and the Humber for the Highways Agency, and he knows them all. Each forms part of a pattern of sub-divisions, timed to take 1½ hours of steady gritting, for which his wagons are lined up ready.
"The work starts here," he says, standing in a Martian landscape of gritting salt - orange gravel which miners at Winsford in Cheshire have been digging up on overtime since the new year. Bulldozed on to a conveyor belt, the salt slides through hoppers into the 53 trucks, each to reach its patch within 20 minutes and finish work in less than two hours.
"We've cut the deadline to 1 ½ hours because we want to make sure we're on top of things," says Mr Dobson, who is confident of keeping the region's motorways and trunk roads clear when the Arctic spell arrives.
Last year's problems weren't in his patch - it was London commuters on the M11 to Cambridge who were clobbered - but he says the agency has learned lessons.
One of them is hidden under the plough/gritting control box in the cab of each £100,000 lorry - global satellite positioning, which allows Mr Dob son's HQ to keep tabs on every truck all the time. Data streams both ways between the gritter and the map-lined rooms at Tingley, near the M1/M62 junction south of Leeds. There have been four major incidents since December.
"We had the ploughs out each time," he says, recalling the most recent incident, New Year's Eve, when many local councils, which deal with the smaller roads, threw in the towel.
Dobson's Army was ready to go from mid-afternoon, when the Press Association Weather Centre flashed a warning over their direct line. The motorways stayed open.
Beating the snow is technically complex, as that episode showed. Part of the problem for councils like Leeds, whose ring road seized up, was the absence of ordinary traffic, which helps to distribute the grit and keep the ploughed snow down. "I've seen times when HGVs have been directed into the M62's outer lane to keep it clear," said Mr Dobson, whose trucks now have a sophisticated spraying system to cover the width of the big carriageways.
The trucks are "big beasties", says Mr Dobson, but some even bigger ones are still awaiting their blooding in Yorkshire.
The recurring problem in Britain - what resources do you put into tackling the rare problem of extreme weather? - is illustrated by the region's five snowblowers.
The blowers, the last resort when ploughs cannot cope, have yet to see action in Yorkshire, although regions further north have borrowed them during the last 10 years.
But like the gritters, the mobile canteens and blanket stores and the rest of the agency's gear, their engines are run daily and today, or tomorrow, or whenever, they will be ready to go.
