The mid-night snow shovellers

Was woken up last night by the sounds of industrial-style snow removal in my street. This involved a large dumper truck, followed around by a smaller truck - basically a moving conveyor belt on wheels - and then a little bulldozer (not shown in the photo, but you just need to imagine Wall-E); together with many men with spades. The procedure seems to be that the little one shunts the snow (which has already been piling up at the sides of streets through the manual efforts of many people with huge, flat snow shovels) into new piles which are then transferred, via the conveyor belt to the big lorry, which drives off at regular intervals to dump its load somewhere else. (Where? Snow-fill?)

When the big 'uns had finished, the little bulldozer remained to 'tidy up', through a repetitive process of scrapping and patting.

I know snow is a fact of winter life here, but it does make the British attitude of 'OhmyGod its snowing, cancel everything' seem pretty pathetic.