STEAM ERA WATER TANK QUESTION ?

[CoalPorter]

I was working on a small trackside water tank detail.
(You know where you put a old tank car on a raised platform
and then install a water spout next to the tracks)
And then i started to wonder how you would really fill that
tank? And if there is a nearby water supply, what is the point
of having a tank?

So, genearlly, how did steam era water tanks get filled and
where did they get the water? I dont think they hauled it on
tank cars.?

[Chris333]

Sometimes they were just fed by a long pipe to a stream at a higher elevation. Other than that there would be a small pump and pump house of some kind.

[LV LOU]

 When a locomotive pulled up to a water tower or tank,the crew would be putting in from a few hundred to thousands of gallons of water as fast as possible.An underground spring could put hundreds of gallons of water into a tank every hour,but not the volume wanted to fill a tender in a short amount of time,so,a tank would have all day to fill for quick,large amounts of water.Many of the tanks near me were actually backed up by huge collecting tanks many hundreds of yards away that weren't much higher than the trackside tank,so enough flow to fill a tender quickly wasn't possible,so the tank was allowed to fill to feed the actual water to the tender at trackside because they couldn't get enough flow to actually fill the tender quickly.The two main yards here on the LV had huge open topped concrete tanks at track level,probably 100,000 gallons or so,fed by mountain springs..