so how do you fill up a fueling station? Do you park a tank car right there, or do you have to park it on a team track to load into a tank truck or what? And also, what type of tank car, for late 70s/80’s era, would hold fuel? thanks
Larger fueling stations probably receive the fuel by pipeline.
Tankcars would be 23,000 gallon up to the high 20,0000s gallon, general service types. I am not sure on the average density for diesel fuel, so I do not know how big a tankcar hauling it can be. The density may be low enough to ship in 30,000 gallon tankcars, I am not sure. I have seen tankcars that size placarded 1993, but that could be many things other than diesel fuel.
Both the BNSF and UP yards around here just have a fuel truck come into the yard and fill up the locomotives and reefers directly from the truck.
It could be by any method.
It could be by pipeline.
It could be by tank car.
It could be by truck.
Since you are asking about tank cars it appears you have decided it would be by tank car. They would use at typical non pressurized liquid tank car built between 1950 and 1990.(older if its a railroad owned car, newer if its a private owner car). There would be a track next to the fuel storage tanks and the a small pumphouse. the tank cars would be pumped into the storage tank. I think it would be extremely rare to have tank cars spotted at a team track than then trucked to the storage facility, In most case the fuel is trucked it comes from a large commercial storage facility and trucked from that facility directly to the railroad storage tanks.
at the time of the PC merger in 1968 the old PRR had one or more large storage tanks near front street in e st louis. diesel fuel came in by barge on the mississippi river and was pumped from the barge to the storage facility through a pipe under the trra tracks, the floodwall and front street.
there were facilties for loading tank cars for distribution of the fuel to various outlying points on the southwestern division.
no doubt, the bulk of it was consumed at the rose lake yard engine terminal about 2 miles away. there was a large above ground tank there and the fuel was pumped from that tank to the engine service tracks nearby. i never saw any facilities for tank car unloading at rose lake but there may have been earlier. the fuel was trucked from the front street facility by a local tank truck operator 8000 gallons at a time.
that trucker stayed pretty busy keeping that tank full since rose lake was probably refueling at least 30 locomotives a day not counting yard engines.
when they back flushed the fuel filters from the overhead lines, the fuel was allowed to just run out on the ground (pre-EPA) so i had them catch it in a couple of 5 gallon cans for me. the only time i bought fuel for my heiny car was when i went on vacation. guess i owe the state a bunch of road tax money but i only did it to help the environment. (lol)
there were rumors that a lot of that diesel fuel got hijacked and sold to truck stops in the area for 30 cents a gallon but that is another story and the guys allegedly involved are all dead now anyway.
grizlump
The Santa Fe had its own fleet of tank cars assigned to diesel fuel service. They were marked with wide gray bands on the right end of the tank as you faced each side (older cars with domes also had the vertical ring of the dome painted gray), and they carried diesel fuel from wherever the railroad purchased it to storage tanks at engine terminals across the system. The cars had bottom outlet valves for gravity unloading, but usually pumps were used to get the fuel into the storage tanks.
The most modern of these cars were the Tk-R and Tk-S classes, frameless cars of 20,800- and 26,000-gallon capcities, respectively. There were 125 Tk-Rs built in 1974, and 150 Tk-Ss built in 1980.
So long,
Andy
CN does it that way here. Didn’t catch which company it uses though, but then again yard shares the same general area (although it’s own property) that all the gas terminals do. Oh lets see, theres Shell, US Oil. Citgo, Exxon, BP, and I think Marathon. There is a large mix of trucks, all the names I listed have their own tanker trucks, and there are also numerous other companies that haul gas that are not associated with those names, like Wolfe Trucking and Condon’s. There is also a company or two like Tittle Town Oil, that is a private company, but hauls off Shell gas to Shell gas stations in the area. I wasn’t lucky enough on that day to have my camera with me, but seeing a bigger (it was CN so most likely an SD75I) somewhat dwarfed the 9000 galoon tanker parked next to it feeding it gas.
If you go this method there is also one thing to keep in mind. Those 9000 gal. tankers usually have 5 compartments, so that rig that I saw didn’t neccesarily have that much diesel on board, it could very well have had only one compartment filled with diesel. Just as a side not modern truck tanker trailers have at least 1 compartment that is around 3000-3600 galoons, just the right size for the usualy locomotive gas tank.
Out at the East Wayne yards, We have a local fuel dealier refuel the tanks with a Tank trailer semi. Kevin
One interesting scenario is on the BN (now BNSF) in Lincoln, NE. They service a lot of trains and a portion of the fuel comes in by tank car. The pipeline facility is in Council Bluffs, IA and the RR-owned tank cars were (and are) shuttled down to Lincoln on certain coal trains. One still runs into a westbound coal train with 6-12 company tank cars between the motive power and the coal cars. These are BN/BNSF/ATSF tankers like those described for the ATSF. Previously some of the tank cars were still carrying CB&Q paint jobs for quite a while, but I think they are all gone now. Some of the cars were even painted in the BN green/black scheme and had been used as fuel tenders but were placed back into the fuel car pool. This makes an intertesting change to coal train operations.
On the UP at Columbus the local power was serviced at a small rack that was fed directly from a couple of company service tankers (12,500 gal)
For the UP locals at Lincoln, NE (when they were still based there) the units either went back up the branch to be serviced at Council Bluffs or would be topped off by local delivery trucks.
GB
A few cars for BNSF to Lincoln have come out of Galesburg. Galesburg is supplied by a pipeline form the Chicago area. Also a lot come from Des Moines. The WQMDMO would bring them to Albia and an MTY westbound would grab them for forwarding to Lincoln.
In Galesburg we had two tracks with fueling pads where we would service any power coming into the yard. Where I work now it all gets delivered by trucks to our large tank by the roundhouse.
At the CSX yard in the wilmington, NC (Leland actually), the fuel comes in via tank ship and then delivered by semi truck to the storage tank by the engine house in the yard area.
John
For the WP/UP facility in Reno, they brought in a tank car & fueled engines from it. May have been a normal 10k gallon tank. Older 1st gen units may have had smaller tanks? not sure how long it would last. Amtrak seems to stop about every 500 miles to be refueled from tanker trucks.
I am currently in the process of modeling the KCS refueling yard in Heavener OK. They have a very large storage tank like you see at a refinery, that is refueled via pipeline. BNSF heavy coal freights are also refueled there before continuing south over Rich Mountain and also the empties on the return leg.