Steam Locomotive Sand House - Chama New Mexico - Gathering of Victorian Locomotives

Take a "deep dive" into the locomotive sand house at Chama New Mexico. While we were at the "Gathering of Victorian Locomotives" in 2021 Pat Maufrais from the Friens of the Cumbres and Toltec gave us a tour of the sand house!

Steve Strebel (friend and great modeler) built a 1:20.3 model of the Chama sand house for our locomotive shops. We are building the Chama coaling tower and a Denver and Rio Grande Western narrow gauge railroad. We already did a "deep dive" video into the coaling tower, and now the sand house.

We could not find any information on the inside of the sand house, so Steve followed standard practices for the workings inside the sand house. As it happened, we got a bunch of things right, a few things wrong.

So, how does a sand house work? Steam locomotives, well ALL locomotives use sand for traction. Steel wheels on steel rails produce little friction, which is why trains can haul such massive loads, but they also produce little traction. So to help prevent wheel slip sand is applied to the rails just ahead of the drive wheels when needed. Steam locomotives carry sand in the sand dome, or domes as many have two or even three sand domes, and the sand for both steam and diesel locomotives is loaded from a "sand house".

On many railroads, including the Denver and Rio Grande Western Narrow Gauge sand was delivered in open-top from bottom gondolas. Then dumped into large open air sand bins. So the sand was wet and full of debris and needed to be cleaned and dried before it was loaded into the sand domes on the locomotives.

Two ways this was done, and we didn't know which was used at Chama. In the first system, wet sand was shoveled onto the floor of the sand house. It was then shoveled into a tray surrounding a large coal stove. From there the warm dry sand was screened into buckets and dumped into a bin where compressed air blew it into an overhead holding tank where it could be "drained" into the locomotives. We assumed this was the system used at Chama. Nope...

In the other system, the wet sand for the outside bin is shoveled into buckets and the buckets are dumped into a screened bin surrounding the large coal stove. As the sand drys, it falls through the screen onto the floor. From the floor, it is shoveled into the big where compressed air lifts it to the overhead tank. The D and RGW used a bin in the floor to hold the sand that was being blown up to the holding tank. The downside of this system is the heavy wet buckets need to be lifted about seven feet up to the edge of the heating screen. Hundreds of buckets each about 20 pounds. The advantage was the warm dry sand on the floor made it a great place to grab a nap!

We assumed that the sand house needed an air compressor to blow the sand up to the holding tank. But at Chama, they use air from the air brakes on the steam locomotives to blow the sand up to the tank! They have a long hose with a "glad hand" to connect to the locomotive. HOWEVER, I found an old photo that shows the air for both the sand house AND the coating tower coming from inside the sand house. An air line crosses between the structures, as does an electrical conduit on wood beams about ten feet above the ground. SO... there was a compressor in there! Steve build a GREAT compressor for the sand house and it turns out to be correct before about 1970...