I found this comment online in regard to how it was handled by short lines:
A common challenge with bulk sand is that it is often damp and clumpy. There were sand drying stoves, in a primitive enclosed building. The stoves were designed with a funnel- like cast iron basket surrounding the upper part of the stove. Wet sand was manually shoveled into the cast iron basket, and with a warm stove, the dried sand sifts down to the floor, where it is then conveyed to either the locos directly ( manual buckets) or by use of a mechanical lifting system, raised up to a height were it could flow down to the loco sandboxes.