dépot Chama

Ron Hildebrand, on May 13, 2009, said:

Actually, the Chama depot is a couple hundred feet south of this spot.

The tall structure here is the coaling tower, which is a large bin to store coal. When a locomotive needs to refuel, it stops with the tender lined up under the tower's chute doors (which are at the bottom of the solid angled walls that can be see in this view) and a few tons of coal are dropped into the tender.

The silver cylinder that appears just in front of the tower is actually a part of the green roofed building. This smal structure, called a "sand house" is where sand is dried and stored for loading into a locomotive. The structure itself holds equipment to dry the sand, and there is a large outdoor pen of unprocessed sand attached to this side of the sand house.

Sand is used to provide extra traction for the driving wheels (called simply, "drivers"). When a locomotive begins to lose traction due to a steep grade, or ice or other slippery substance on the rails, sand is released from a dome on top of the locomotive's boiler, falls through a small diameter tube and is directed onto the rails just in front of the drivers, to provide extra traction.

The dome where sand is carried on top of the locomotive is called a sand dome, where heat from the boiler keeps the sand warm, dry and free of clumps), and this cylinder on the sand house holds dried sand ready to be gravity-fed into the locomotive's sand dome.