I have a cannery on my layout and I have been doing some on-line research. Evidently, vegetable oil and/or corn syrup could be a load-in to the cannery, with unloading from the tank car to an outdoor storage tank with piping connecting the tank to the cannery building. The only tank kits I have found are diesel/gasoline/oil storage tanks. Any ideas as to how something like this could be modelled? I found a generic outdoor fuel storage tank along with piping which could be adapted, but I don’t think it makes much sense to pretend it is stroing corn syprup or vegetable oil when it looks like it is really storing gasoline or disel fuel.
Google it. But I think you will find that a tank is a tank is a tank. It might have a stainless steel lining in it, perhaps a glass lining in it. Out water tank has a painted epoxy lining on the inside.
I think you best bet however will to be to use a railroad tank car sans truck and gear mounted on a brick or metal saddle, this way there would be gravity flow from the tank to the cannery.
Google “NSF Tanks”, or “bulk food tanks”. Here is one that I found, although it looks like it would be kept indoors which of course is another option for you.
ROAR
get thee unto an auto parts store and check out their selection of freeze plugs. these make decent tank ends. then find yourself some plastic or metal tubing that works with the freeze plugs and you can build a good looking tank with a little effort.
charlie
Yep, a tank is a tank.
However, there are visual clues to what a tank holds. The first would be the signage. Shell means fuel, while Kraft means food, to use a couple of familiar names. You’ll know what works for your situation in this vein.
We actually have food plants around here. Generally things like tanks and piping are painted white at food plants. Although white is not unheard of at petroleum depots, in fact, kind of common itself, there’s silver, black, and other colors, depending on any visual branding.
Fuel tanks tend to have earthen or other enclosures to capture a spilled tank. While I think the standard now is to generally have such enclosures for most types of liquid tank storage, this is something that was less common at food plants versus fuel.
Try building your own tank farm. Get yourself a plastruct catalog, buy a tank kit that you like and go to town. My HO tank farm is a petrolium distribution center. The tanks are modified kits. All of the structual, piping and valving is plastruct. Give it a shot. My system took a year and a half to construct, and I had a blast doing it.
Good luck CCG
A full blown tank farm is a little beyond what I have envisioned. But, this going to be a little easier than I thought. I am on the plastruct trail.
Hi!
Other than obvious safety factors, there is little difference between liquid petroleum and edible oil storage tanks. I spent my “early years” at three edible oil refineries before moving across the street to the petroleum refineries. I was absolutely amazed that there was so much between the two industries that was alike or similar (except for investment and product values of course).
Outdoor tankage (in my experience) was a max of 43 feet high and perhaps 30 feet in diameter, with typically no berms. Piping was in the top and out the bottom. Some tanks had steam coils inside for the thicker crudes. There were access hatches on top and along the bottom sides. Also, edible oil tanks were typically placed closer to one another as compared to petroleum tanks, obviously for safety reasons.
One other thing… to the observer on the outside, edible oil refineries tended to be pretty “dirty”, whereas petroleum refineries tended to be very neat/clean.
All the above is based on refineries in Chicago, Joliet (Illinois), Louisville, Texas, and New Jersey from the 1960s thru the 1990s.
(c)2011 shultzinfosystems.com
(Found on a layout construction blog : http://www.railroad-line.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=19104)
Hi again,
May I add a little of my personal experience of edible oil storage tanks…
Every 1st of the month, starting at 7 am, we had to physically measure every storage tank (outage) in the edible oil refineries. This was in the 60s and 70s when sophisticated electronic measuring was not used as much. Also, it was on the heels of the Billie Sol Estes Oil scam, so it was a concern that each tank was checked out.
It didn’t matter if it was hot or cold or rain or whatever, we hit every tank in the refinery - which inside and out would be well over 50. It was a hot/cold/dirty/dangerous job - and most of us loved it.
mobilman, you measured the outside of the tanks???
As usual some very interesting and helpful comments.
I am thinking now of a hybrid solution. I have some plastic tank cars which will not be run. Remove the trucks from two of them, paint the tanks white, sit them on some sort of cradle, apply some verbiage ie “corn syrup” on one and “vegetable oil” on the other , or better yet do a search for 1950’s era logos from ADM or Cargill, for example, and then get some piping and run the pipes from the delivery car to the tanks and then into the bldg from there. If this does not do the trick, I have a line on some plastistruct tanks that are bigger and more in tune with the pics that were included on this thread.
mobilman, I was thinking about your posts, and, as an aside I recall touring a cottonseed oil refinery about 15 years ago. I was struck, in retropect, as to how “dirty” the place was as you describe your experience.
In the Model Railroad Planning 2010 magazine, there was an article about a corn syrup transloading facility, then for the MR project layout building the BAy Junction branch, they built a corn syrup transloading facility. In the article, it was in the issue about how they “kitbashed” background industries for the project, they used tanks from the Walther’s “McGraw Oil” kit. They used the tanks that were designed for outside oil storage. So perhaps one or two of those tanks, or something similar, would work for you.
OIL=Clean???
Food=Dirty???
Petroleum Oils are handled by big companies with big budgets and staffs.
OSHA and other safety guys patrol the ground, and oil is slippery stuff that must be cleaned up.
Food Service inspectors work differently. They are concerned about the insides of the tanks and piping. These will be flushed and probably steam cleaned regularly, and the insides of the plant ought to be up to standards. Outside in the yard there are few people working around the tanks. Their safety record probably points to other places in the plant that need the attention of the inspectors.
There is a commercial “Bakery” in Dickinson that receives many commodities by rail, but especially flour and sugar which are delivered in covered hoppers. Would you believe they blow that stuff through pipes just as if it were a liquid.
I put Bakery in quotes because they really do no baking there. Product is mixed, proofed, fabricated, and then instead of an oven a huge commercial freezer is used. Product goes in at the bottom, and goes round and round and round and comes out at the top completely frozen. It is packaged and x-rayed before shipping. Apparently they do not want pieces of metal in their product. An interesting place. Clean on the inside, all of the appropriate legal/cleanliness issues were addressed as if it were a hospital operating room. We did not see outside where the tracks were, but you can assume that they were railroad tracks and looked like railroad tracks.
Food Service tank cars and hoppers must be cleaned before re-use, there is a rail car cleaning plant in town, cars are steam cleaned, sealed and certified with appropriate paperwork before being sent to their next assignment. You MUST be careful when steam cleaning your rail cars.
ROAR
Hi once again…
Here is some more info that has little to do with the OPs original questions…
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We measured outages of all tanks, using a special float and tape measure. Each tank had a chart that converted the outage measurement to the volume of oil in the tank. Adjustments for specific gravity and temperature were also made.
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Some edible oil refineries did not handle lard or tallow. They worked with vegetable crudes - soybean, peanut, corn, palm, palm kernal, coconut, and a couple others. Those refineries - and this is the early 70s on back - did not have to have USDA inspectors, for the simple reason that “germs will not live in vegetable oil”.
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But, if you processed lard and/or tallow (from animal fats), then a USDA inspector must be on the premises.
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One last thing… the difference between cooking oil and stuff like “Crisco” is simply hydrenation - the infusion of hydrogen gas. The refineries had hydrogen plants, typically enclosed in thick circular walls so if they “blew”, the force would go upward.
Thanks for the opportunity to go down memory lane…
I hope they were pleasant memories.
Great info, mobilman44.
I have a slight semantic quibble with your description of containment in case of an explosion. The point is actually so that the blast reflects off the walls, then goes UP.
Explosion-proof containment is possible, but very expensive. The blast has to go somewhere if it happens to minimize damage to people and property around it. Up isn’t perfect, as stuff can still head off in various directions and trajectories, but physics limits the potential for widespread harm, because gravity is a, well,…I won’t say it here[:)]
Hi,
As I recall, I was told the circular walls were to contain any potential explosion, allowing the effects to hopefully go up instead of out. Thank goodness I never witnessed their usage and obviously they were never tested. I’ve been around a few fires and explosions in the refinery industry, and that was enough.
I’ve fabricated a couple of vertical storage tanks from pieces of 2" (inner diameter) PVC pipe I had left over from a remodeling project. I “carved” panel seams into the sides of the PVC tanks using the jaws of my digital caliper. One jaw rides along the end of the length of PVC pipe while the point of the other jaw is used to scribe horizontal seams around the circumference of the pipe (make sure the end of the pipe is cut off square). After I had cut the seams around the circumference of the pipe, I used a steel straight edge and a hobby knife to scribe vertical seams. A piece of .040" styrene sheet was glued to the “top” of the pipe and the edges were trimmed and filed flush with the face of the pipe. Add a few pieces of plastic kit sprues for inlet and outlet pipes, paint, decal and weather and you’ve got a pretty decent looking tank for little cost. These two tanks are 17 HO scale feet in diameter and 30 scale feet tall so they make a good industrial storage tank. If you don’t have any PVC scraps, ask your neighbors or look around a construction site. Somebody always has a few scrap pieces in different diameters laying around.
Yes, don’t want to be around when things go boom. My brother-in-law worked doing video and network production for some of the attorneys involved in one of the explosions a few years back.
Hydrogen gets special respect. For all the talk of a hydrogen economy, that stuff is “delicate” to handle and deal with, to say the least. All I can say is “Remember the Hindenberg!” [~]
That is something that is worth modeling,…uh, the blast walls that is. Otherwise, don’t try this at home, kiddies.
A bit off topic but I watched a program (could have been Nova) where a NASA hydrogen expert revisited the Hindenberg event only to find that the fire was caused by static discharge igniting the skin of the airship, NOT the hydrogen. In their quest to find the most sun reflective finish, the Zeppelin company doped the skin of the Hindenberg (and only the Hindenberg) with what was later discovered to be solid rocket fuel! Because Germany wanted to keep the compound a secret for future military use, they allowed the Hydrogen to get the blame. When the NASA expert discovered what the actual cause of the disaster was, the Zeppelin Corporation (still exists) invited him to visit their archives which verified his findings.