AUBURN – At Emerson Toyota, the work started hours before the first snowflake was slated to fall.

Cars: tightly packed.

Keys: organized.

Snow equipment: ready.

Workers: hoping for snow instead of ice.

“We’ve got it down now,” said owner Jim Emerson, who’s dealt with snowy car lots for more than 30 years, ever since he was a boy helping out at his father’s dealership.

Any Maine driver knows the back-aching work it takes to shovel out a single car after a snowstorm. Multiply that by 400 for the Emerson dealerships in Auburn.

Or 600 locally for Lee. Or 1,200 for Rowe’s area dealerships.

When snow falls, it’s a challenge.

“Saturday morning we’ll all be here at 6 a.m., every able-bodied biped we can find,” Emerson said.

Like many car dealers, Emerson, Lee and Rowe dismantle their long, neat show rows and pack their vehicles into tight blocks so snowplows can get around them. For weekend storms, some cars go inside the shop, raised on lifts and parked beneath. But because the service departments are scheduled to be open today, many dealers reserve those bays for customers’ cars in for repair.

Local dealers started moving their cars Thursday afternoon, organizing keys so they’re in the same order as the vehicles parked outside. When there are hundreds of cars to clean off, warm up and move out, workers can’t spend an hour hunting for the right key.

“We’ve learned a little bit over the last 71 years,” said John Isaacson, chief executive officer of Lee, which opened in 1936.

At his dealership, workers planned to plow all night to keep up with the storm. At Rowe, they expected to come in at 3 or 4 a.m. Cleanup lasts for hours, using Styrofoam push brooms on cars and bucket loaders and plows for the lots.

Rowe normally keeps four or five plow trucks, but it sold two earlier this week.

“We thought spring was coming,” said Jake Anderson, general sales manager for Rowe,

It takes hours for workers – from owners to salespeople – to clean up after snow. They try to be done by the time doors open the day after the storm. Or at least by noon.

But ice can stop everything, well, cold.

“It gets inside the locks, it freezes on the windshields,” said Anderson, whose workers use hand-held torches to thaw locks. “You have to run cars for an hour.”

But while they watched weather forecasts and prepared their lots for the storm, local car dealers didn’t begrudge the area its snow.

Especially since spring is less than three weeks away.

“Hopefully, March will go out like a lamb,” Anderson said.