Looking to build a medium sized H.O. Scale Oil Refinery and tank farm… anyone have any pics of theirs? I need some ideas. I seem to remember an article in a MR mag about a year ago?.. Anyone know which one? ANY help would be much appreciated! I did see the nice Tank Farm by JPmorrison that he posted earlier this year. GREAT job! Anyone else have refinery set up with the Oil car terminals?
Here’s three prior threads on the topic:
http://www.trains.com/TRC/CS/forums/1152856/ShowPost.aspx
http://www.trains.com/TRC/CS/forums/740866/ShowPost.aspx
http://www.trains.com/TRC/CS/forums/1155906/ShowPost.aspx
Scale Rails, the NMRA magazine, had a great article on an excellent looking fascility. It was a few months back. I’ll try to find the article and see if there is a URL for the layout.
Rob,
I just retired from the oil bizzness (petroleum & edible) after 40 years, and worked/visited about 10 refineries and several terminals, etc. Obviously I have a soft spot for tank cars and such and have quite a collection.
A few years ago I decided to give those tank cars some place to go. But, to model an HO refinery of any size that in my opinion would look remotely realistic would take up a good size area, at least 20 sq feet or more. Also, refinerys are extremely complicated, with piping going everywhere, and various towers and buildings all over the place. And, tankage is needed for crude oil, intermediate stage processed oils, finished products (3 grades gasoline, 2 fuel oil, slop oil, etc.), and of course dome shaped tanks for the butanes used as feedstock and propane which is a result of the refining process. In short, the above was way too big a project for me.
So, I built an oil terminal. Using various cornerstone kits and scratch materials I came up with a double tankcar rack, 8 storage tanks, and a truck loading rack - all with piping going to/from. One cool thing is that you can run piping “into the ground” to go under tracks or roads and come up on the other side. Anyway, Cornerstone has two different piping kits, Interstate fuel oil kit, various storage tanks, and the loading platforms. Somewhere else on this forum a fellow built a beautiful strip of about 6 or 8 of these hooked together.
My oil terminal is in 4 modules, and is currently sitting in a plastic storage box as I am moving some sidings/wiring in the area - which is why I have no picture.
Hope the above helps - and does not hurt your enthusiasm!!!
Mobilman44
Rob2121,
I worked in a Chevron refinery for 32 yrs. so I have some expirance.If you were to build a refinery the real estate required would take up your whole layout and then some.In the layout that I’m building now I will incorporate a barge dock,tank car spur,2 tanks,truck loading rack and an office.
I’m in New Jersey and the tank berm requirment–the berm must have enough capasity to hold one half of the tank that it surrounds plus 6" of rain.
Vince
Wow… I had no idea! Thanks for the “Heads Up” regarding the size requiremnets. Maybe a terminal would be a better way to go. If any of you have that article in Scale Rails, please let me know where I might find it.
Thanks for the help so far!
Rob
I wanted to model a chemical plant. I checked books out of 3 public libraries and copied enlarged pictures of every picture in every book of the 3 libraries. I used them for information and also for back drops which give the illusion of a bigger facility. You could do the same for your oil refinery.
Same on the Chemical plants - at least those affiliated with oil refineries. They are soooo complicated and filled with details and very large. If you can get the right background to provide depth and give the illusion of size, that is terrific.
By the way, during a stint at Mobil’s Beaumont Texas refinery in the late '80s, I actually got to ride in the cab of their switcher, which with minor exceptions stayed on the Company property. Ha, trust me, that place is HUGE, and is next door to Mobil’s largest Chemical plant.
The folks I was with thought I was nuts because of my love of trains. They couldn’t get over how I oogled the 4 truck tank cars - which I believe are no longer in service due to their size.
Also, I pulled a guy off the tracks as he was standing there daydreaming as a 50ft boxcar was slowly coming towards his backside. With the wind and general noise, you could not hear it at all. Someone did not secure the brake wheel properly. My point, be careful around the prototypes!
ENJOY,
Mobilman44
mm:
Right. I don’t think anybody who wants an oil refinery should give up because he hasn’t got a lot of space. If we did that, we’d never be able to build anything. Not all refineries are huge, either. Allow me to introduce you to American Refining Group’s Bradford, PA refinery, which makes lubricating oils:
Here’s an old postcard, from when it was even smaller:
http://www.cruisin66.com/oldgas/kendallrefinery.jpg
Doesn’t look so unmanageable, does it? There used to be dozens of small refineries like this around here.
Now, even this plant would be very big on a model railroad. I’ve seen it in person, though, and
I can assure you that it’s very difficult to visually “scale” an oil refinery. There aren’t a lot of windows, doors, or other elements which give us known size references. It takes up a lot of the “scene”, but just how much is hard to say.
This works to our benefit in a model scene. We don’t have as much space, so the model doesn’t have to be as big to take up most of the modeled scene. This means that, if you shrink down each element a little, take some out where it doesn’t hurt plausibility, and eliminate some repetition of elements, and augment the models a little with the painted backdrop, and suggest that some stuff exists off-table, a model of the Bradford refinery could easily be built in one end of a 4 x 8 HO layout, and could easily generate the illusion of reality, even if it wasn’t exact-scale.
Here is what you’ll need:
-Have the major functioning features there, and modeled as closely as possible.
-With repetitive elements like tanks, don
Good Morning!
I certainly would not try to discourage anyone from building a refinery or chemical plant (or anything else for that matter).
In any case, I do need to add two “howevers” to the earlier comments…
-
A lot depends on the timeframe of the layout. Refineries of the early 1900s were certainly no where near the size of the late 1900s.
-
The term “refinery” in the industry denotes where crude oil is fractionated into its various components and the products produced are gasolines, fuel/diesel oils, #6 oil, coke, and propane. The industry term for plant that produces lube oils is called a “lube oil plant”. Note that in larger refineries (i.e. Mobil’s Beaumont refinery) these two facilities are located together.
I think that one could look at this as akin to the steel making business as built and written up so nicely by Gil Freitag (spell?). There are a lot of corners that can be cut, but to do it justice (my opinion of course) you need a lot of space.
Having said that, only an oil nut like myself would really care about the workings in the refinery model as used on a model railroad. I suspect most would just care about the t/c and truck loading and unloading facilities and perhaps barge facilities.
By the way, the latest grass roots refinery built in the US was Mobil’s Joliet, Illinois refinery, which started up in 1973. I was there from the start, and it would make a perfect model for anyone in the modern era that was really interested in the refinery per se. It is located at I-55 and the DesPlaines River, which is close to I-80. Also, crude and product pipelines are very close (easy connections). And, the land was purchased from Santa Fe, which of course is the RR serving the refinery.
Sorry to go on about it, but it really is a neat place…
Rob 2112,
Try this method for your refinery. The tops of spray paint cans make the perfect storage tanks for all sorts of applications and in your case you might try using the forced perspective idea with placing the lids back into the background of your refinery scene. Also, if you know anyone with N scale they might just fit the bill for full sized oil storage tanks in that scale.
The lids make great water storage tanks in HO as I have one painted John Deere green and yellow for my J.D. supplier. Also you could cut out the logo of various oil companies and place the names on your tanks as I did with a John Deere stick -on decal set from Hobby Lobby craft store.
Best of luck,
johncpo
mobilman44 wrote:
mm44:
1: Definitely. In fact, the pictures I’ve seen of the early refineries, even up to the early 20th
century, are hardly anything like the refineries of today. They usually seemed to have a
number of fairly modern-looking storage tanks, but little in the way of towers or visible piping;
the refinery itself is usually a long brick building, with what I presume to be stills lined up in
a row, and rows of chimney-like towers. Indeed, the buildings almost look like open-hearth steel shops, and although I’ve found a lot of pictures, I’m having a very hard time figuring out how these old refineries worked. It doesn’t help that many of the pictures were taken after horrendous infernos. 
I’d greatly welcome any information you could share on this subject.
- You’re right. However, the Bradford plant does indeed fractionate crude oil – Penn Grade crude
You could model the edge or corner of a larger refinery, and put the rest of it “on the wall.” If you make a wall backdrop and run tracks up to it, with some tanks in front of the tracks so that the cars can get “into” the refinery, you can minimize the footprint while still having a “realistically” sized facility.
Here’s a picture of an entire small refinery, except for the loading racks, which were off to the right in this photo: 
This was the Husky reinfery in Cody, WY, which produced primarily asphalt. It’s now an empty, fenced-off field. The phot was taken in about 1995, when the refinery had already been shut down for 15-20 years.
Another possible way to “model” a refinery is to swipe a John Armstrong trick. Put the loading rack, pump house and a minor maze of piping on the fascia side of the main track(s.) So, where’s the refinery?
You’re standing in it - in the aisleway.
The same idea can be used to “model” almost anything - including a cosmetics factory. That was a wall, 220 scale feet long, three stories tall and 2" thick that housed the local control panel.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
ROBB
If I remember right there are several refineries over towards El Dorado, Ks.
CHUCK
[#welcome]
Here is an try at my oil refinery"N"scale It is not finished yet,about A hundred miles of pipe yet to go[:)]
JIM
[#welcome]
Here is an try at my oil refinery"N"scale It is not finished yet,about A hundred miles of pipe yet to go[:)]
Click to inlarge
JIM
Hi,
Again, my comments were in no way meant to discourage anyone from building their version of a refinery or anything else. Having spent 40 plus years in and out of refineries and such, I find that I am “sensitive” to their size and complexity. Thus, when I see a simply built model and its called a refinery, I try to bite my tongue and not be a critic. Ha, usually I am successful at that.
There are small refineries out there, but many of them were shut down in the '70s or thereabouts as they were no longer viable and/or the plethora of pollution control laws made it more profitable to just shut it down and write off the assets and sell the units as scrap. I personally know of small ones in Casper Wyoming, Augusta Kansas, Buffalo New York, East St. Louis, and East Chicago that were scrapped. So while there are small refineries still out there, they are fewer and fewer.
I believe Autobus prime asked more about the working of a refinery. The basic concept of a refinery is to heat crude oil in a still (think booze), and split out the various components into feedstock for the making of gasolines, fuel/diesel oils, and by products like propane, sulfer, coke (the dirtiest stuff you will ever be around), and bases for making lube oils or asphalt, etc.
Secondary units are also fueled by heat transfer (i.e. furnaces) and they further process the products mentioned above. Note that “gasoline” that comes out of the crude refining process is only about 60 Octane, and it is blended with various other petroleum products to up the Octane to the 80 plus we all use. Oh, some of those big round tanks in a refinery contain butanes, which is added to gasoline to pressurize it. That allows it to easily vaporize in your engine so it will burn (only the gaseous state of gasoline will burn).
In some of the older refineries the furnaces look like something from the old Flash Gordon movies, and they are hot and dirty.
Thanks to all that have responded! You’ve all given some great advice! I will have to scale down a bit it seems, but thats OK. I will have to do some research on photos etc.
Anyone with pics of a chemical plant or oil terminal/refinery etc please share if you can! I know these make great points of interest on layouts.
Oh, by the way… anyone ever “model” a “Giant torch” or whatever it is called that burns off the excess gas vapors? Please forgive me, as I dont know what they are actually called. I have a few ideas on how to model a “working” flame, but was wondering if anyone else had attempted too.
Hi again,
Those “torches” are called flares, and are used primarily as an emergency relief valve in case of excess pressure build-up in any of the refinery’s units. But, they are also used to flare off unwanted gases too - although this is not done anywhere near as much today as it was years ago due to cost of gases, pollution controls, and public perception.
The flares are typically always burning, kind of like a pilot light on a stove. So when excess pressured gas hits it, it will burst into flame. When you see a huge flame, it usually means there is a problem in the refinery operations.
During a stint at a major southeastern Texas refinery, I was about 1/2 mile from the main flare when it “went off” due to an operational situation. The noise was absolutely deafening and we had to put our earplugs in place, and even more impressive was that you could actually “feel” the vibrations thru the ground!!!
Ok, one thing you could do to simulate a “flare” is to pick up one of the imitation battery powered candle lights used a lot at Halloween and Christmas. With a bit of wiring, you could move the bulb to the top of the stack and keep the battery/switch in a shed nearby.
ENJOY!
Mobilman44