24 buckets! My friend Al Lill was speaking to another model railroader last week, who helped around the CNR Victoria roundhouse in his youth. One of his jobs was to fill the sand dome on the little consolidations that plied the Island line, and he told Al that they held 24 buckets of sand in their sand domes. The usage depended very much on the engineer: some hardly used any sand and some had to top up during the day!
I was surprised to hear sand consumption was so great. I would have expected a tenth as much, and with Pembroke’s small engines I thought a car of sand might be an annual occurrence.
The Pembroke Southern and the line to Ottawa were not mountainous, but they weren’t flat either. So, let’s suppose the two engines consumed 10 buckets of sand between them per day. A bit of Googling for bucket sizes and sand densities and a bit of mathing results in an estimate of 30 lbs per bucket of sand. So, 300 pounds per day.
But wait, the freight cars were also small in 1905. The CA flat cars (they had no gondolas, but one could be made from a flatcar when required) only held 40000 lbs, so a car of sand would be needed about every 133 days. That’s still not much, but enough that sand might be delivered in Pembroke’s perpetual August. So, when he visited last week, Brian Rudko brought a car of sand to town.
Brian’s delivery also happened to be the first real freight delivery to Pembroke. Sure freight cars have moved, but never with purpose. The gondola of sand, however, came with a waybill, based on real typographically lavish Canada Atlantic waybills. Now that I have a waybill form, I will need to develop a freight operating scheme to go with it. How should I generate traffic for Pembroke?
Pembroke:87 