Re: Sand at Chama

The sand house was hugely labor-intensive, back when we were still using it, almost all of it involving a shovel. First, you had to shovel wet sand from the storage bin into a wheelbarrow. Then you had to wheel the barrow into the sand house, and dump it onto the concrete floor, near the stove. After accumulating many loads on the sand house floor, you had to throw the sand up into the basket surrounding the acorn-shaped pot-belly stove. The top of the basket is quite high - more that 6 feet, if I recall correctly - at any rate, quite a hard throw to clear the top and get the heavy wet sand into the basket. After completely filling the basket with wet sand, it was time to light off the stove. You would start with wood kindling and add coal once the fire was going. With the fire going, the sand house was closed up completely to maximize the heat. The fire had to be maintained for several hours as the sand dried.

The sand would fall out of the basket as it dried, back onto the floor, all around the stove. Once all of the sand was dried, there was more shoveling to be done. First the dried sand had to be shoveled from the floor through a screen into a small adjacent room. From there, the sand had to be shoveled into a funnel placed into a hole in the top of an underground storage tank, directly below the visible external storage tank seen up high on posts in front of the sand house, next to the track. When the underground tank was full of sand, air supplied by a locomotive (or from the engine house, when the pipes were still good) was used to lift the sand up a pipe from the bottom tank to the top. If all went well, you now had a full tank of sand, ready to fill an empty locomotive sand dome. So it was basically a strenuous full-time job for a man to keep the sand house ready to fill a couple of sand domes a day.