Sand House Conversions

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

I am building a Walther’s sand house and have an operational question.

According to several articles and on-line references, the gist of sand house operations (pre-1950ish) was: the outside bin was filled with wet sand, the wet sand was shoveled into a mesh drying stove, dry sand fell to the floor and was shoveled into a dry sand bin, train crews needing sand would fill buckets from the dry sand bin and hand carry them to the engine… This kit is obviously from that era.

However, this kit also has remote sand towers that would seem to require either some type of penumatic system or some poor dude filling buckets and climbing the tall ladder to fill the storage tank by hand; even in the time of no labor cost, I cannot see the latter happening.

So, how were these old sand houses converted? They hardly seem large enough to contain a drying stove, fuel and a mechanical transfer system.

Thanks.

2

It is true manual labor was used in a lot of locations. Blowing the sand through a pipe to the top of the sand house bin was the most common way to fill them. Compressed air from the yard compressor needs just a couple of inches of room. Air lines were either buried or strung over head in most of the servicing areas. Another way but not as common was a bucket elevator/conveyor system. Then there were places that used bagged dried sand and stored it in a dry location. Others used screened dry sand hauled in covered hoppers and blown into the tower bins.

It is very important that the sand was kept dry as possible. Damp wet sand clumps and sticks and would not flow out of the locos sand box.

Pete