Anybody know exactly what is in a sand drying house and what the equipment looks like. Links to pictures or pictures would be a great help. I’m talking the old coal fired ones from the late steam era. Fred
I’m pretty sure every railroad was different but basically the sand needs to be dried out and the easiest way to do that is with heat. After the sand is baked it is transferred through an air line to the tower bin. Now I suspect that this was pretty much a batch operation with some type of chamber that held a couple of hundred pounds of sand that the operator shoveled in and shut and sealed the door. When it reached a certain temperture he opened a valve attached to plant air and siphoned it all out. Then he started over again.
STEAM OPERATIONS OF THE CHESAPEAKE &OHIO RAILWAY AT HINTON, WEST VIRGINIA
by
William E. Simonton, III
Has some drawings of a large sand bunker but I have not found an explanation of how it works.
Hello “Hardwood,”
I don’t know of an online source, but if you have access to a large library collection (maybe through interlibrary loan), you can try to find a copy of the “Railway Engineering and Maintenance Cyclopedia” published by Simmons-Boardman. The 1942 edition covers sand driers and sand houses on pages 668-669, including photos of three different commercial sand driers, and drawings including internal arrangements of small and large sandhouses.
In the smaller sandhouse, green (wet) sand was hand shoveled from an outdoor storage bin into a conical drier built on top of a stove. As the sand dried it sifted out the bottom of the drier onto the floor, and was then shoveled into a screened bin that funneled it into a below-ground storage tank. From that tank it was siphoned by compressed air into elevated storage/delivery bins or tanks. (The sandhouse stove made this a warm place for railroaders to gather and talk, and “sandhouse” became a railroad term for gossip.)
In the larger installation, green sand was stored in a silo above the drier, fed by gravity into a steam-heated drier bin, and again sifted out the bottom through a screen and into a below-ground collector tank. From the collector it was siphoned as before into elevated delivery tanks.
so long,
Andy
Didn’T MR do a feature on a sand house plus pump house with derrick back in the 1960’s. Seems to the Old Dog they also did a “bucket” coaling station. If the Dog remembers correctly a company called FineScale?? later made kits using the plans.
Have fun
Yep’…Fine Scale Minatures