I have three rather arcane questions about steam-era coaling stations, particularly mid-sized reinforced concrete versions.
I have found lots of pictures of coaling stations, but none show the coal supply track inside the unloading shed. Where the unloading track went through a covered shed with a pit for unloading, were the rails typically laid on standard ties through the shed, or were the ties cut or omitted over the pit where the coal was dumped?
Also,many concrete coaling towers had sand storage bins inside the tower. For example, a drawing of a large Pennsy coaling tower (on page 37 of Dixon’s"Steam Locomotive Coaling Stations and Diesel Locomotive Fueling Facilities") shows separate bins for wet sand (above) and dry sand (below) in the main tower, but that was an unusually large facility. Typically, if the tower did include a sand bin, how was the sand delivered to the tower? (I am assuming that sand was delivered in gondolas and therefore would have had to be lifted or shoveled out, not dumped like coal delivered in hoppers.)
For concrete coaling stations that had internal sand bins, what did the sanding apparatus on the outside of the tower look like? Since sand went into the locomotive while coal went into the tender, did sanding necessarily requiring repositioning the locomotive rather than doing both at the same spot?
I’ll take a shot here and expose my limited ignorance for all the world to confirm how very little I know.
A coal car is spotted at a chute. Next to the chute should be a vertical elevator type belt with many buckets going straight up or nearly so. At the top the buckets rotate over and down, dumping the coal into the coal bunker of the tower.
Ash pits would also have thier own elevator or… in case of poor railroads manual labor with a shovel. Manual labor was cheap in those days.
Im guessing that the sand would have been blown up by air tube carrying a negative pressure into the top storage for wet, then dried out and sent to the ready bin to be poured by a gravity hose into a engine.
In extreme cases of coaling a locomotive has two options. Parking under a bridge and having a dump truck dump it or having it dump onto a portable conveyor belt which lifted it to the tender.
Moving the engine to and fro to fit the various “Stuff”, hatches to the hoses, chutes etc was not a big deal. A steam engine can easily creep here and there with a tug on the bar.
the rails over the unloading pit were typically laid on steel I beams laid longitudinal to the rails. The spaces between the beams and between the beams and the pit wall were filled with steel grate bars on roughly 6" centers, to prevent workers from falling into the pit. Standard ties were laid up to, but not across, the opening.
More typically in an intermediate-size facility, the sand drying house would be a separate facility at ground level. Dry sand was blown to the tank at the top of the tower by compresed air, and dispensed down the tower sides in pipes which angled away from the structure at the bottom to somewhere near the place where a sand dome would be when the tender was spotted for filling. A length of rubber hose on the end of the pipe completed the sand feed linkage. Dry sand flows like water as long as the pipe/hos
Those bars were not there for worker safety and in fact they are quite a safety hazard. They are there solely to prevent oversize coal and large foreign objects from entering the pit and jamming the coal handling machinery. The technical term for parallel bars with sized openings to reject oversize material is a “grizzly”, and they are commonly found in all bulk handling operations including coal mines, hardrock mines, gravel pits and quarries, and mass earthmoving operations. Grizzlys protect the hopper on concrete pumps and the feeder on rock crushers, and any mechanical bulk material handling device where hard oversize objects may occur. The grizzly works by permitting correct-size material to fall through and oversize to hang up – or slide off, if the grizzly is sloped – and then a worker breaks up the oversize lump of coal or rock with a sledge, and if it’s foreign, carts it off and disposes of it.
Grizzlys are quite dangerous to people. Stepping on one is likely to cause a broken ankle or leg, a fall leading to a fractured skull, or all of the above.