I’m modeling a small branch line in the 1920’s and I was wondering (not being old enough to have any personal experience) what did they use to pump the water into the water tower? Would they have used a windmill? My watertower will be located next to a millpond.
Thanks in advance for the help.
Tim
If the water tower was located on extremely flat land (say, a prairie) and fed from a well, a windmill powered pump might have been used.
If the water tower was located in hilly country, it probably would have been fed from some point uphill, in which case there would have been no pump required. (At least one mountain-country water tower was fed by an open flume running from a nearby stream to the top of the tank.)
By 1920, electric pumps would have been used if the area had electricity. Unless the location was extremely rural and utterly lacking in industry, electricity would probably have been available.
If there was a municipal water supply, it might have been tapped to fill the tank.
In hard water country, some Class I railroad water tanks would have been flanked by treatment facilities (to at least partially de-mineralize the water.)
So it really depends on whether you are modeling New England, Kansas or the Sierra Nevada on exactly how water would have made its way into the tank.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with water tanks filled from uphill sources)
Windmills as a source of pumping power were picturesque but generally did not work out well in practice as they could not reliably deliver the quantity of water needed to replenish the tank. If electricity or a gravity source were not available, then a small boiler and steam pump would be provided in the water treatment shack next to the tank. You can assume that by the 1920s all steam boiler water was treated as the deterious effects of untreated water on boilers were well known. True, the water in some areas of the country did not require treatment - but if you are pumping from a pond - you at least need to let the moss, scum, and silt settle out.
dd
Thankyou for the information. The area that I’m modeling is Western Maryland. It is quite hilly but I don’t have a hill close enough to the tank location to run a feeder. I have a 10’ X 10’ shack that I built out of paper card stock a couple of years ago for a challenge posted on this site. Would that be large enough to house the pump and water treatment equiptment?
Your 10 by 10 building should be plenty big enough for a pump and water treatment equipment.
The western narrow gauge water towers (DR&GW, RGS) had their pump houses directly under the tower. It was nestled inbetween the timbers and cross bracing. The pump house was incorporated into the structure when the water tower was built. Such pump houses were insulated from the cold to keep the waterpumps from freezing.
If you send me an email address, I will send a few pictures to you of my water tower in G scale. It is mostly scratch built and was built from plans of a RGS water tower.
Gravity-fed was always the #1 preference, because it has no operating cost. Municipal water supplies are gravity-fed (pumping may be used to create the gravity head); if the railroad could tie into a municipal water supply, it would; if not, it needed topography to create the necessary head. Railroads often supplied the municipality with water in small towns, rather than the other way around. For example, the Los Angeles & Salt Lake (later UP) supplied the water to the town of Las Vegas, Nevada, until the 1940s! There are quite a few railroad water tanks still in use that have been given by the railroad to the town, because it’s the key to the town water system, for example, Wendover, Utah.
If gravity-fed isn’t cost-effective (topography too flat), then pumping was used. Steam-powered positive-displacement pumps were ubiquitous until commercial electricity became widespread. Because commercial electricity wasn’t common outside of significant municipalities until the 1930s, rural water tanks continued to use steam pumps. Lines with signaling systems that provided their own power (instead of battery power) enabled electrification of pumps in rural areas. But signaling systems carrying their own power didn’t become common until the late 1920s-mid 1930s and most secondary lines and branch lines were never signaled.
Windmills were extremely rare for railroad water tanks because of very low output and lack of dependibility, as well as lack of strong winds on a regular basis in many locales. The iconic windmills seen in the arid west to fill stock tanks rarely put out more than 200 gallons per day. There were some windmills used in very early railroad construction in the West. There’s a famous A.J. Russell photograph of about a 30’ diameter windmill at Laramie. It lasted only until coal mines were opened at Carbon 2-3 years later and then was scrapped.
Thus for the 1920s,
Thanks for all the information. I do have a small free standing boiler model that came with another kit. Maybe I can incorperate that into scene.
Tim
The boiler and pump would be enclosed in a building to protect them from weather and depredation, as well as to aid in maintenance and operation. “Free-standing” boilers and engines out in the great outdoors are ad hoc short-term installations seen in construction, temporary logging operations, and boom-town mining camps, but not in permanent railroad use. A contractor building a railway might just throw up something like that for a summer season but no railroad worthy of the name would ever contemplate anything that sketchy for its operation.
S. Hadid
You could have the steam boiler etc. inside the pumphouse, and have the door open with someone doing some maintenance work on it. From what I’ve seen pumphouses often had a big door (kinda like a garage) so if you had that open you should be able to see inside pretty well.
Thanks again for the great information. I could build a small building to house the boiler, and leaving the door open is a great idea.
My 1873 Santa Fe watertower has a hand pump at it’s base for pumping up water from a tank car.
Gasoline and kerosene engines were in wide use at that time…There was a suitable gas engine built for any job you could imagine…Pumping water, sawing firewood, running a generator, powering a machine shop, running a washing machine, furnishing belt power for a grain elevator, grinding feed, well drilling machines…you name it, there was a gas or kersoene engine that could handle the job.
I’ve seen some of these engines on display at state fairs and in our local railroad museum. Another excellent idea. I’ll have to choose my water tower kit and based on that decide what type of filling technique I will employ. Thanks again for all your help.