In the past few months I have been working on the engine facility at the end of my model railroad. You may remember my posts of some of my other recent scratch built buildings, the water tower and the coal tipple and the last one of my detailed section house. So here is the next building on the complex. This is the sand house and the sanding tower. I used an old tender shell for the sand bin. Older railroads like my DAV&P. had a habit of using things on hand. You could say necessity led them to recycling long before the term was coined. The inside of the sand house has a upright boiler ( green in the photo), a coal bin under the feed water tank ( left side). Then in the center is a steam engine / air compressor. In this case a compound steam engine was converted so that one side was used for the compressor. The air reserve tank is in the rafters above the stem engine and the sand dryer/pulverize on the right side. An auger in a large pipe brings the sand in from the tender / sand bin and dumps it into the dryer. Where steam from the boiler is used to dry the sand and power the sand pulverizer. Sand is then blown by compressed air out and up into the sand towers tank. I cant wait to start on the roundhouse. Un like the one in Dunkirk ( my first one). The one here in Falconer has 2 walls on the edge of the layout and is right at eye level, cuz its on the second level. So I have plans for a more detailed interior and a complete scratch built machine shop. I still have many other projects for the Falconer shops, like the ash pit.
Although I work in N scale because of size constraints, G scale has always always fascinated me because of the detail you can add. Very impressive!
The layout is 2 levels and is in a basement apx. 28’ x 18’. Its point to point with 2 roundhouse and turntables + 6 towns and 4 passing sidings and many industries. It closely fallows a now defunct short line. Most ok all but 3 buildings are scratch built.
Hey Phantom in Dunkirk - this is Mike in Rochester. Modeling in N Scale. I've been searching for descriptions or photos of the guts of a sandhouse and all I've been able to find are outside shots (and models). What did you base your interior on? Mike
Mike, I ran into the same problem. I searched and searched and then searched again and found many pictures of the outside of a sand house and nothing on the inside. So I asked a few friends and a few old-timers who had been in one or 2 of them. From how they explained how the process worked I came up with my sand house. There are many variations and my sand house might be a bit more then some. But it made for a nice model. In a nut shell the sand was brought into the sand house by an auger or compressed air / vacuum. It was then put in a dryer, then crushed and then blown up into the sanding tower where gravity or air pressure brought it down when it was time to fill the sand box in a locomotive. Now in my model I used a boiler to make steam to run the air c compressor and the dryer. Smaller railroads not unlike my DAV&P would have had a simpler dryer and the air pressure may have well been supplied by the locomotive being serviced. This was often done by taping into the brake lines on the locomotive. So in short I went a bit more elaborate with my sand house, it made for a more interesting model. Also note that I stuffed a hole buildings worth of machinery in ½ a building.
