I am modeling in HO & working on my steam engine service facility. I was wondering how big an ash pit was and was it just a dirt pit,or did the sides have some type of lining? Also were does the sand get loaded in the engine? Thanks all you steam lovers.
Larry
I’m not sure about dimensions but here’s one I “freelanced”. It’s just a hole cut in the foam:
The beams are Evergreen styrene.
The depth isn’t as important as having a way to remove the ashes from the pit. You could use a conveyer such as the kit offered by Walthers or some other type to lift the ashes out of the pit. Another option which I have seen prototype pictures of is to have a parallel track on a lower level where a gondola or hopper collects the ashes after they are dumped into a bin below the upper track.
Steam engines had a sand dome over the driver wheels and gravity would release the sand onto the drivers to give added traction.
How deep a pit is depends on how much is going to be dropped into it. A single mogul (2-6-0) wouldn’t necessarily even get a pit. A yard serving challengers would get possibly several big pits and/or mechanisation.
If you were unlucky you got the job of emptying the pit by hand… then loading it into a gondola.
A pit would be stone, brick or concrete with a solid bottom. The sides have to support the loco’s weight. The floor needs to have the ash shoveled off it without disintegrating or getting deeper.
Pits had to be drained… often they were pumped out… because a pipe drain would get blocked.
Sand could be loaded manually by shovel or sacks or from a sand tower. various suppliers make sand towers (and store sheds).
hope this helps.
The biggest one I’ve ever seen (in pictures) is the DL&W one at the yards in Scranton, PA, the current site of Steamtown NHS. There’s a nice picture of it in the lobby of the welcome center, part of the series of displays showing the evolution of the yards. It serves two tracks, the outside rail of each track is on the side, and the inside rail is on concrete piers. The floor slopes down at about a 45 degree angle toward the center and it has a flat bottom, the picture shows it covered with water. The overall pit depth seems to be about 15 or 20 feet.
Some ash pits were actually flooded, to quench the ashes. These used mechanical hoists to get the soggy mess out of the pit, usually bucket conveyors. The result would be that the entire area would become a muddy swamp the color of cinders.
Those odd pipes running down the side of some coaling towers are sand service pipes. The sand would be dried in a separate facility, then blown to a storage tank in the top of the tower by compressed air. (Dessicated sand flows like water.) In other places, the sand was stored in small hopper structures above the sand house or, much later, in the kind of storage tanks now common in diesel service facilities. Only a short line would bucket load sand domes. Bigger locos operating in heavily-graded terrain would swallow sand in multi-ton gulps.
Hope this has been helpful.
Chuck
Thank’s for the lesson in steam yard operation’s. I am building a short line so i will line the buckets up by the sand house. LOL
Larry
Would 8 scale feet be too deep? Not deep enough?
I’m planning to fleelance one 8 scale feet deep by 12 scale feet long and about 12 scale feet wide, using HO scale. (About 1" deep x 1.5" long and 1.25" to 1.5" wide.)
I’ll be running nothing larger than Mikados. Would that size pit be too big? Not big enough?
Thanks for the input.
WHD
Depth would depend on how you plan to empty it. I wouldn’t want to shovel ashes and cinders out of anything much over 4’ below the railheads. On the other hand, a deeper pit would make installing a mechanical hoist easier.
I’d go for a little more length. That way your hostler could get the ash pan over the pit without having to precision-spot the loco.
The working ash pit at Chama, NM, on the Cumbres and Toltec (ex-Rio Grande) narrow gauge is about 5’ deep and 20’ long. The loco goes up on a raised track and one side of the pit is open, like a huge fireplace. Pit bottom is concrete, don’t remember what the sides were (except that they were definitely masonry.) The bottom of the pit is a couple of feet off the ground on the open side, probably for ease of shoveling into an open-top vehicle.
Now I’ll have to start thinking about my own ash pit(s.) My main operating site is an engine change point, and my short line is all steam.
Chuck
Someone said that sand is carried in domes above the drivers and dropped by gravity… This was true in early days but very soon got replaced with pressured sand with few exceptions.
IIRC If you check out the sander tube on most steam locos you will see that there are two pipes up to almost the outlet… this is one tube for sand and one for steam to blast the sand out. On a diesel you get an air pipe instead.
I’ve recently discovered that on some modern equipment in the UK the sand is now fitted in small cylinders that look like the gas bottle in the back of a home freezer. This can be pressurized but also cuts out manual handling of the sand and stops sand getting anywhere around any of the on-board machinery that you don’t want sand to get. It also stops the sand getting loose on the steel decking - dry sand on a steel deck is a lethal slipping risk (bear in mind that a footplate is about 6’ off the ground outside… slipping off that is like falling off a semi trailer… and you can go onto an adjacent track or down a bank).
As far as ash pit depth goes… just think about what you would want to have to shovel out from. One loco can drop into a long shallow pit and ease forward as it does so. Big and many locos tend toward mechanical devices as noted.
Don’t forget all that mess has to go somewhere… usually gons sometimes hoppers. Which means that if you are shovelling it out of a pit you will then have to lift it by some means into the car. I think hoppers were usually used with mechanical systems for the obvious reason of their greater side height plus the fact that more ash would want more rapid disposal.
Both gons and hoppers could be loaded by front end loaders.
Gons had to be unloaded somewhere and somehow… this isn’t the sort of thing that would justify a rotary dump. I guess that gons would be unloaded by some sort of mechanical shovel or back hoe with the last bits left in or taken out by hand shovel
I have seen several configurations. I used the Walthers conveyor kit because it was simple and required little space. If I had been more ambitious, I would have used a lower level track parallel to the pit. The prototype I saw had beams supporting the track over the pit, the pit was open on the side of the lower level track and the bottom of the pit was inclined toward the lower track. A gondola sitting on the lower level track could easily receive the ashes dumped into the pit from the upper level track.
I went a scale 10’ deep X 10’ long and a tad wider thant the rail spacing. I modeled mine after the one advertised in Wathers. It used a cable winch system housed in an enclosure on top of metal scaffolding to hoist a bucket down in the ash pit up and dumps in a gondola or hopper position on the track beside it. I’ll try to get my drawing posted if you want and I can figure out how to do it. Tweet
I just remembered the handy-dandy Kalmbach “Model Railroader’s Guide to Locomotive Servicing Terminals” from 2001 residing in the library archives. On pages 30-33 there is an article called “Ash Pits and Cinder Joists.”
The ashes were either shoveled manually by hand, or; later into the steam era mechanically by a hoisting mechanism (cinder joist) when it was more economical generally when more than 25 locomotives were to be handled in a 24-hour period.
Either ash pit modeling solution would ideally require two tracks: One for the ash pit track and one for the low gondola car (manual removal method), or; one for the ash pit track and one for the hopper car (hoisting mechanism removal method).
Under the manual removal method: The ash pit removal track (depressed and graded down into the side of the ash pit and stub-ended for only one gondola) for the shoveler to place ashes into the low-sided gondola => would closely parallel the ash pit track (open rails/no ties) supported by iron pedestals under two supporting I-beams under the two track rails along with the surrounding ash pit concrete-sided retaining walls. There are also a few iron bars connecting the two supporting I-beams for greater strength to replace the now absent wooden ties under the two track rails.
Under the manual removal method: The top of the ash pit rails for the steam engine are at a height of apx. 4 feet for shoveling yard worker’s easy access and his ease to get the ashes into the low-sided gondola. It would be kind of like shoveling snow in your driveway by throwing it over your shoulder to rest on top of a four foot retaining wall.
The hoisting mechanism removal method would require much more layout space, a lot more scratchbuilding, and good prototype resource pictures.