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