I’m looking for information on sanding towers. I’m getting ready to build one for my roundhouse, but I had some questions. How did they work and was the sand dried and if so was it by a boiler or more like a furnace? Any information would be gratefully appreciated.
did a quick search on google and came up with this link, http://www.arema.org/eseries/scriptcontent/custom/e_arema/library/2001_Conference_Proceedings/00031.pdf it has loads of information and some photos/drawings regarding sanding towers. George
They can be pretty impressive in a engine house. Here is a picture of the six San Antonio sanding towers in 2000. They were not in use at that time. You can see that they were a significant feature of the maintenance facility. Here is a model in N scale.
If you're looking for some great sanding towers Walthers makes some cornerstone ones for the steam era with the drying house and all. American Limited makes some modern towers, I have two on order now, they are sold assembled and painted or as kits. Hope this helps!
Thank you for your input. I still haven’t quite found what I’m looking for. I’m planning on modeling a cut away or my sand tower so the drying house is cut in half and when you stand in the isle of the layout, it will look as if your standing inside the sand tower. With the open edge right along the edge of the layout. This gives the viewer an interesting look into the building. So I need to know a bit more about the drying possess and so on. I model in G scale and all my buildings are scratch built. With cutaways I can model some really interesting things at an interesting perspective and actually use less space. Here is a picture of a station I did some time ago, it will kind of give you an Idea as to what I want to do with the sand tower and drying house.
