Coal is delivered to the engine tenders in various ways. Buggies or cars loaded by hand may be wheeled over a platform alongside the coaling track and above the level of the top of the tender, or they may be wheeled on a bridge spanning the tracks and having hinged spouts to be lowered to the tenders. Locomotive cranes with grab buckets may deliver coal from the stock pile to the tender. The most general method is to place the coal in elevated bins fitted with hinged spouts, the bin being either parallel with or across the tracks. For loading the bins, coal cars may be pushed up an incline by a locomotive or pulled up a steeper incline by a cable hoist. In many cases the cars dump the coal into a hopper beneath the track, whence it is fed to an intermittent vertical bucket ele vator or a continuous conveyor which delivers it into the bin.
Where oil fuel is used, special tanks, pipes and oil columns are required to supply the ten der tanks. Economy demands that fuel de livered to each engine should be weighed or measured and recorded, and special automatic apparatus for this purpose is in use.
Ashpits where locomotives have their fires cleaned consist frequently of two parallel shal low pits — under the engine tracks — with a deeper pit between them for a car into which the ashes are shoveled or sluiced. The ashes
may be dropped directly into small steel cars standing in deeper pits under the engine tracks, these being pulled out on an incline at the end or side of the pit; or with a pit transverse to the tracks the engines may drop the ashes into fixed steel hoppers from which they are dis charged at convenient times into a small car running on the floor of the pit. This car is hoisted out and emptied by a crane at one end of the pit. Another plan is to put the engine tracks over the sides of a Y-shaped pit, the ashes sliding down into the deep part, which is full of water. The pit is cleaned by a grab bucket handled by a gantry or locomotive crane.
Cleaning passenger cars is provided for at terminals on groups of tracks usually connected at one end only, but sometimes at both ends. Wide spacing affords room for operations, and permanent staging may support the cleaners' platforms. The yard is paved and drained. Pipes with hose connections at intervals supply water for washing, steam for heating, com pressed air for charging brakes; and sometimes there are pipes for vacuum cleaners, as well as electric connections for lighting cars and charg ing batteries.