Hello everybody,
I was wondering if anybody had any tips in scatch building or kit bashing a various chemical plants from various chemical industries.
Chemical plants are hard to model in their entirety because they are so massive, one could make their whole model layout of just one chemical plant and the industryle trackage that goes with it, from living in Sarnia, Ontario aka chemical valley i know how hard it is to model these industries. I would also like to hear any tips form others
Whenever you try to model a chemical plant or refinery you only try to give the impression that it’s a complete plant. There’s no way you can do an entire plant, it’s like trying to really model a steelworks. The key things are to model one area that looks like a processing unit, probably some tankage, and a loading rack to give you some excuse to spot tank cars there. Both the loading rack and the tankage could be said to be raw material in, product out, giving you double reason to spot cars.
One of the best examples I’ve seen recently is in an album over on railimages. Go to Carl Sowell’s album, there are several good shots of his refinery module. It’s the first sub-album, entitled NTrack Modules. Go to www.railimages.com/gallery/carlsowell , then click on the first photo, which will bring up about 15 more, a few of which are of the refinery. These are apparently done on N Track modules so they’re not enormous. But imho he has really captured the look, the feel, and the coloration of the real thing. You could do worse than use his work as a guideline.
I spent my entire career inside refineries and petrochem plants, and his work comes the closet that I’ve seen to the real thing (in a reduced amount of space).
(By the way, Shaun, one of my projects was at the Imperial Oil Refinery in Sarnia back in the early 70’s. So I understand what you’re talking about in terms of the size of that area).
Regards
Ed
Junctionfan,
In the 70’s, I worked at a chemical plant that made herbicides. It was a very modern plant and was built to meet EPA pollution standards to the letter. What we had was a three story enclosed process building with two tank farms for the raw products and they could be serviced either by rail or truck. The finished products were pallets of 55 lb bags of flaked and concentrated herbicides that were loaded on both rail and truck from the end of the building. We had a distillation column that extended out of the top of the building about 40 feet. You could have the Walthers refinery kit give you that added touch.There also was a boiler house outside the main building. It wasn’t physically a large plant, but maybe you can get an idea from this and add more. ADDED NOTE: When the plant closed, the EPA condemned the entire sit. There was some really bad stuff used in the process and the presence of dioxin.
Hope this helps
REX
most chemical plants have lots of pipes for transporting liquides from A to B and further,
A cheap way to make nice pipes is using the drinking straws you can bend, painted silver and wheatered they look very convincing, I also used the plastic racks that are part of most plastic kits and usually thrown away to make pipes,
I’m planning on adding a chemical plant based on Art Curren’s Arrowmtatic Chemicals (May 1995). Considering I’m modeling 1951/52, what would this plant ship and receive and in what type of cars?
I agree with the comments noting the difficulty of close to prototype realism since most plants are large and complex. Most chemical plants (or refineries) consist of multiple process units, each typically with heater(s), columns, heat exchangers, piping. And they take up a lot of land. Even a small refinery I worked in had originaally at least 5 process units plus utilities (steam boilers) and tankage and took a fair amount of space. A really small/simple topping refinery or chem plant could have less.
But, I was willing to compromise (vs exclude) and squeezed some refinery items in the corner of my small HO layout. Re: kitbashing, I combined a Walthers kit with a Vollmer kit, blending the pieces better by using a common paint color. Real units would have some columns (generally hot and cold ones) insulated, and the more ambient temp columns painted. And the paint might be different colors in different process units. I have some piping kits (Walthers and Faller) in the closet to add some detail at some point. I also have added a background scene to add the idea of the equipment being the beginning of a larger industrial area.
I’d say if you have some space and want to tackle it, kitbashing with some scratchbuilding has many possibilities and can be fun.
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Worked in the chemical industry for 33 years. Some chemical plants are very large and would require a very large layout. Others are very moderate in size. I have visited many small chemical facilities that made fine chemicals that where in three story brick buildings. Most were served by one railroad tracks and had 2 or 3 outdoor storage tanks. Tanks were usually in concrete diked areas for spill containment. A chemical plant such as a two reactor methyl silicylate (oil of wintergreen) facillity would be easy to model. It would need a batch reaction tank and a batch wash tank. Product would be packaged in 55 gallon drums. Plant I worked in made this product in a two story brick building. Methanol was received in tank cars, stored in verticle storage tank. Salicylic acid was received via a pipe line from another department. The product goes into food flavoring and into linament.
I visited Mallinkrodt Chemical Company in St. Louis during an interview trip. It was a collection of very old brick buildings. It had one rail siding. Almost everything was inside old buildings. This company made laboratory chemicals and pharmacueticals. I believe you could find pictures of it on google earth street view. It is still there as of three years ago.
Another good starting place would be to use part or all of Walther’s ethanol plant kit. It is a modern chemical industry. The model closely resembles actual dry mill process ethanol fermentation plants. Wet mill plant tend to be larger as they also produce corn oil and corn syrup. The ethanol plant would be a good place to start for a kit bash chemical plant.
10 year old thread.
But for anyone interested the Petro-Chemical Plant kit made by Plastruc is a good starting point. http://www.plastruct.com/Pages/Hobby.html Go to their search page and enter “1008” in the Catalog Code box.
The componets from which the kit is made up are also available separaetly.
Walthers has many Plastruc items in stock:
No bigger than 10,000 gallon tank cars. Most likely shipping container for year period would be a 55 gallon drum.
The term “Chemical plant” is a pretty broad one. It could include small or very large installations, and could involve many varied processing methods for a variety of chemicals. I have seen at least one small “chemical plant” in Everett, Pennsylvania, that looked like an assemblage of wooden barns with unusual rooflines; and of course a large chemical plant could stretch for many city blocks. Ideally, I would suggest finding an actual prototype plant and trying to replicate that, possibly in compressed form.
The AC&Y Historical Society’s online magazine Vol. XVIII No. 1, Spring-Summer 2013 had an article on a plant at Copley, Ohio where the Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co (3-M, the Scotch tape people) had a plant that processed raw sulfur into sulfuric acid. The plant also produced the mineral granules that covered roofing shingles. The article has several photos that could help in the building of a model. Included are photos of the classic wooden 3-M boxcars, as well as 8,000 gallon acid tank cars similar to the ones recently produced by Tangent.
Tom
Probably no longer matters.
I work at a mid sized plant making pharma. this could be served with a two line spur (and once was, off a UP line right outside our gate)
You would have tanikers of solvents in, two a week of different solvents (acetone, methanol, isopropyl acetate, isopropyl alchohol, isoprpyl ether, etc,) and three going out of mixed solvent waste (generally separated in to hi or low chloronated, or high or low dicloromethanol), box cars of starting solids in, refferes and box cars of product out, and occasional flat cars of heavy equipment (reactors or driers) in.
buildings would be boxes with mazes of pipes. if anyones actually going to model this, contact me and ill get some pics for you. thing i most often see lacking is secondary containment - basically, when you have holding vessels outside, there should be a three or four foot wall around the base of them, and things like safety shower/eyewash stations, grouding cable reels, pumps and hoses, NFPA placards, or different drums. “chemical plants” as opposed to things like oil refinaries, use many different chemicals, and those come in different material containers - acids will come in polymer drums and totes (big square things with cages around them) because acids eat metal, and caustics will come in metal drums, powders come in fiber drums, all plastic wrapped on pallets. raw materials also come in metal and poly totes.
even assuming all your equipment is inside, there will be mazes of pipes on the outside - cooling and heating (we have 0 degree cooling brine, -40 cooling brine, liquid nitrogen, and water) heating (steam lines), gases (nitrogen for inerting reactors, oxygen, air for breathing systems and big air handlers both going in and coming out), and things like condensors and scrubbers, with associated fans.
there will be utilities like TCUs (temp control units, local heat exchangers), knock out pots from condensors, filter housings, pumps, breathing and n
Arrowmattic Chemical Complex, Art Curren, May 1995 issue of MR. Very cool looking complex from kitbashing/kitmingling.
Chuck
Put some inbound/outbound tracks and loading facilities on the layout with most of the plant on a photo backdrop. You can model all the complex detail in whatever size plant you desire with the snap of the camera shutter. Preprinted backdrops may be available.