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