Re: New D&S Sandhouse

I (as well as Jeff Johnson and John Coker) have many fond memories of the Durango sand house. During the later years of the DRGW, the engine watchman could keep up with sand for the two trains a day just by spreading it out on the floor to dry. After the beginning of the D&S, and 3-4 trains a day (plus helper engines), we had to start firing up the stove and drying as previously described. It was a very labor intensive process.
At the time, we had some engineers off the “main line” who tended to turn the sanders on in Durango and off sometime after they arrived at Silverton (Coker knows who I am talking about). I swear these guys would turn a sound dome inside-out after a round trip with a short train! Anyway, the management at the time wanted to keep these guys’ hours up in the winter, so after arrival of the winter Cascade in the afternoon, they would help out in the shop. It didn’t take long for us shop guys to figure out that the sand house was the perfect duty for these guys. It was amazing how they started to conserve sand on their trips to Silverton, only after a couple of days of “sand house duty.”
By about 1984-85, the shop guys were trying to convince management that purchasing dry sand would be more economical, rather than the labor intensive method in use with the old sand house. Bradshaw wouldn’t hear of it. So, after some thought by some of the shop guys who had to deal with this on a daily basis, I included, we came up with a plan. We had to start drying a huge amount of sand to prepare for the summer season, so we decided that we would build a fire in that dry stove that would hopefully dry more than just the sand! The fire was so hot, the stove pipe was cherry red all the way through the roof. I guess we hoped that there would be some kind of damage (fire?) to the structure that would render it useless. Nothing happened to the building, but the cast stove itself shattered into about 100 big chunks! We were overjoyed! Of course we had know idea how this could have happened. Steve Jackson talked to Bradshaw about buying dried sand. Bradshaw told Jackson to make an effort to try and find a coal fired replacement stove. Will, the boys in the shop and I knew that Steve wasn’t going to be able to find a 19th century coal fired, sand dryer in 1985! Wouldn’t you know, the first place Steve called, sent a catalog with about 10 different stoves for this purpose in various sizes. Before it was all over with, I ended up helping install another stove in that old sand house, and it was half again as big as the old one. Darn!!