After reading the posts, opinion and commentary in the thread about the new oil discovery in the Gulf I thought a some of you might want to have a few of your own oil wells working away on your layout. Here is a link to Lufkin’s site http://www.lufkin.com/oilfield/index.html
There are plan drawings for a wide variety of pump jacks and each type has dimension tables so you can build any size or type jack prevalent in the region you may want to depict. Click the catalogs and download them to find the plans. There are also pictures and other sections that may help with details and painting. No need to buy a model pump jack when a few plastic shapes, and a hobby knife will offer more choice and a better more accurate model.
If you are modeling an old field or a shallow field scroll down to the Churchhill catalog. Here you will find drawings and pictures of the older type balance beam pumping units. They haven’t changed much in looks or design since they started using steel instead of wood so they would suite just about any era.
Some time in the dim and dismal past, John Armstrong had an MRR track plan article based on oil industry operations in the Bakersfield, CA, area. My spotty and highly selective memory can’t pin it down any closer than the 1950’s (I think.)
Since it wasn’t an area or industry of prototype interest to me, all I remember are some oddball detailing items included in sketches with the article. (Series of pump jacks operated by cables from a single central engine - in order to keep the system balanced after pulling the pump rod from a capped well, the operator hung an old engine block from the pump end of the jack.) There were a bunch of other things that would have made detailing the field interesting, as well as an analysis of what kind of traffic would have been generated.
Chuck (who models a country that doesn’t produce oil to matter)