Thanks to everyone who has responded to the puzzle of the trestle and dump cars at Newcastle. And I say Newcastle with no certainty that that is where the photo was actually taken. The "Newcastle - Cambria" lettering which is all that appears on the back of the postcard print is in pencil and could have been added by anyone at any time. But I feel quite certain the view is not at Cambria, which was located in a canyon at the end of a steep branch up out of Newcastle. The coal mines there were neither owned nor operated by the railroad, though much of their output was purchased by the railroad for locomotive fuel, and there was, quite simply, no room for such a facility as this in the confined yard space at Cambria. Further, locomotives such as the R-4 Prairie seen in the photo were just not used on the Cambria Branch, and there would not have been more than one locomotive at Cambria at any given time. One of the class L-1 0-10-0s was the normal power for the branch until their retirement in 1916, and if an L-1 was not available a D-4 Consolidation would be used. Prior to the advent of the 0-10-0s, a little G-1 0-6-0 was kept at Cambria to switch the tipple and large road power worked the train up and down the hill -- but this was in the early-mid-1890s, not in the era of our mystery photo.
While I'm certainly not convinced that the contrivance in the photo is for handling the waste products of coal combustion by steam locomotives, let me say that, while railroads improperly called the cars used to haul away this waste product "cinder cars," they more accurately called the locations where the waste was dumped and cleaned from locomotive fireboxes "ash pits." The cinders created by combustion were either blown out the stack of the locomotive -- normally dead but all too often still live and thus the source of many fires along the right-of-way -- or were trapped at the bottom of the smokebox and removed manually on a regular basis. What was dumped from the firebox was ash and clinker, the latter defined as the incombustible residue, fused into an irregular lump, that remains after the combustion of coal. To be certain that the ash and clinker in an ash pit were not still smoldering and hot when the pit was emptied, the contents of the pit were normally hosed down with water, which then drained away, allowing the waste product to be safely removed, even in wooden containers such as the little cars in the photo. And the ash and clinker were chunks in the 1- to 2-inch range, quite consistent with what appears in the photo -- though admittedly some of what is seen in the photo is larger than that. In the early years of the 20th century this material was often used as track ballast or as fill and would be hauled wherever it was needed, preferably in a bottom- or side-dump car, though solid bottom cars were used when dump cars were not available and the material would then be hand-shoveled from the car. This was an era of cheap labor, and it was quite common for the contents of gondolas to be unloaded by hand by a group of men with shovels. (On the C&S in Denver, coal destined for the fuel platform at Forks Creek on the narrow gauge Clear Creek District of the C&S came into the yards in standard gauge gons from the northern Colorado coalfields, was transferred by hand into narrow gauge gons for movement on west, and then was again shoveled from the narrow gauge cars onto the coal platform. From there it would be hand-shoveled into the tender of a locomotive. What left the mine as mine run or lump coal was often reduced to egg or nut size by this repeated handling.) And as for the apparent value of the spilled material beneath the trestle in our photo, the fact that there was a man with a shovel present under the trestle may simply be because if the spilled material were allowed to accumulate day after day, it would eventually build up to levels that would force its removal, so it was simply more practical to keep it cleaned up on a daily basis. And of course the idea of a man or two with shovels to clean up the spillage and heave it up into the car was in keeping with common practice of the era.
The little cars on the trestle are almost certainly the product of some manufacturer other than the railroad, as they appear to have many specialized metal parts that, while they could have been cast or fabricated by the railroad, would not likely have been turned out by the railroad in such small quantities. And we certainly have not seen photographic evidence of the use of similar facilities elsewhere on the Q. So our best bet is probably to find the little cars in an advertisement or catalog of some manufacturer of material handling equipment. The fact that two of the cars have visible CB&Q lettering reinforces the idea that they were purchased, the manufacturer having stenciled them with the initials of the buyer and no numbers being needed as they were not in any kind of service that would see them leave the yard where they were used. And with their very short wheelbase, Jonathan's statement that the trestle may have an access ramp that curves sharply around to the right and is blocked from our view by the presence of the trestle itself seems quite reasonable. But how do the cars move up and down the trestle when their visible wheels are at a 90-degree angle to the run of the trestle? One would expect that if there were a pivot or turntable of sorts mounted between the body of the car and the undercarriage, it would raise the height of the cars and be at least somewhat visible. Finally, my biggest problem with these cars being in ash/clinker service is that Newcastle simply did not service enough locomotives to necessitate the use of a dozen or more cars the clear its ash pit. Within a few years, motorized elevators would begin to be employed to empty ash pits, and they would employ a single metal hopper smaller than one of these cars to accomplish the removal of the waste material from the bottom of the pit, requiring the services of just one man to shovel the material into the hopper at the bottom of the pit.
Clearly, we still have many more unanswered questions about what we are looking at in this photo than we have answers!
Hol
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Posted by: Hol Wagner <holpennywagner@msn.com>
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