I just complete building Walthers Sanding Towers and Drying House kit. I am very happy with the way it turned out but I am puzzled by one thing. The kit documention says that typically, the sand would be delivered in gondolas. How would it be unloaded from the gondolas into the sand bunker. It seems like that would be a lot of work to do it manually but how else could it have been done? With hopper cars you could drop it into a bin below the tracks and use conveyors to lift it into the bunker but the kit doesn’t have anything like that.
Depending on the era, it could indeed be unloaded by hand. Just some guy and a shovel. Yup. Not only seems like a lot of work, it probably was!
Lots of tasks up to the 1950s were done by hand. Might seem a little hard to believe, but remember the first railroads were built by guys with pickaxes and shovels, with the help of some horses.
Andrew
jecorbett,
Manual labor was cheap back then so - yes - most often the gondola was unloadig by one or more guys and their shovels. I also have the Cornerstone Sanding tower and Dryiing house and have been very pleased with it.
Tom
I have seen small RR cranes using a bucket unload gondolas carrying sand or rock and even coal. They make a huge stockpile and then a loader can pick it up and put it in its final location such as a hopper, conveyor belt or even in the case of coal in a tender.
Doc