Dry Branch Water Station: Why ?

[NW Mailing List]

Vince provided a pretty good explanation of Dry Branch, yes, it was pumped out of New River.

https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=197143

This drawing depicts a proposed water filtration area next to the river. This tank, being on the south side of the railroad, obviously was to handle traffic on the mainly eastbound track. 

The why is obviously speculation this many years past. It appears that water stations (and in many cases, coal) were between 10 and 15 miles apart in the early days. Remember, these tenders were small, 6,000 gallon or less tanks on the early G or W, which can easily be consumed in a reasonably short time, even with the smaller fireboxes of the day. So, yes, they would take water every chance they could. Particularly where it was a pusher district, they would need to handle pushers in many locations.

Best
Ken Miller

> On Nov 29, 2020, at 8:14 PM, NW Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org> wrote:
> 
> I have always enjoyed trying to figure out why the Fathers did what they did.
>  
> So, why was the water station placed at Dry Branch?  Obviously, that was a location convenient with respect to a single track tunnel, a potentially busy junction with the Bristol Line, and a helper district, all of which lay ahead for an eastbound train.
>  
> But, other than those railroad operating considerations, was there a hydrological reason for placing the tanks at Dry Branch?  Many busy railroads used the runoff of springs and small creeks on large mountains as a source of water for gravity-fed tanks, and sometimes build large open-top stone reservoirs for storing the water at an elevation above the tanks.  But a study of the maps and satellite imagery around Dry Branch does not seem to indicate that this was the case.
>  
> So, it would seem that locating the tanks at Dry Branch was based purely on the characteristics of the railroad, and not on the availability of abundant water from a mountainside.  Is this right?
>  
> Was the water at Dry Branch pumped out of New River ?  
>  
> ( What would be REALLY interesting to know is the operating practices with respect to places at which water was routinely taken, back in the days when the M's were the biggest engines on the road...  I asked several men who had hired 1906-1916 about this, and they all told me the same thing, which was not a very satisfying answer:  **We took water at every tank we could, because he never knew how long it would be before we would get to the next tank.** )
>  
> -- abram burnett,
> Collector of Turnips in the Subjunctive Mode
>  
>  
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