What does the inside of a sand house look like?
Kinda sandy.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist! Maybe you could be more specific?
Rpger
Sand was refined; that is screened and dried. The dry sand was transfered to overhead bins by air flow. Then the engine sand domes and boxes are feed by a pipe and gravity flow. The sand was shoveled into the machine from the ooutside supply pile. So the machine looks like a screen and a horizontal rolling drier drum. The vat at the end feeds a pipe that has air moving from a fan to the overhead bin. Way back, there was an article about steam engine sand processing. At Barstow, the sand arrives in hoppers ready to transfer to the sand fillers in the service island. Even there, spills and errors cause it to be sandy.
The answer to your question depends a lot on the type of sand house you’re talking about, the era modeled, and the railroad modeled. Some shortlines used nothing more than a coal or wood stove with sand being dried one bucketful at a time, and then being stored in an indoor wooden bin that had an access hatch to the outside for loading the sand into a locomotive using buckets. Mainline railroads in the steam era had more elaborate facilities consisting of a large outdoor bin to store sand that was brought in by the hopper or gondola load. One I remember that belonged to the Missouri Pacific had a pit into which the sand was dumped from a hopper. A conveyor then transferred the sand into an outdoor, open holding bin. Another conveyor transferred the sand from the outdoor bin into a large indoor elevated drying vat that had a coal fire underneath. The sand sometimes had to be dried for one or two days, depending on how moist it was. After drying, the sand was transferred by yet a third conveyor into large enclosed cylinders over two tracks, from which it could be transferred into a locomotive through a hose. Walthers used to have a model of a sand house in HO scale listed in their catalog, so check their Web site or printed catalog for one in the scale you are modeling.
To truly know, you must become one with the sand!