I am wanting to build a refinery but am not sure what products are moved by rail and what products are moved via pipeline. I live in Tulsa, so I can see two large refineries, but don’t have a clue how they work, what they actually produce etc. I see lots of tank cars moving in and out of them daily but wonder what exactly is in them.
My initial thought was oil in and gas out. I understand there are oil pipelines and gasoline pipelines. What exactly are the tank cars for? The refineries here move many, many tank cars each day.
I read the artical a few months ago in MRR, but it was very general in how/what products are moved in the tank cars.
Anyone know the answer, please let me in on it so I can set up my industry correctly.
My layout is set in the late 90’s to today. I have a 2’ x 4’ area for the refinery, but only plan to model the loading areas with 3 or 4 loading tracks and 1 or 2 storage tracks and of cours the sheds, piping and storage tanks that would be near the loading tracks.
It doesn’t really matter what’s in the tanks… if you check more closely you will probably see that they run in blocks of one company and, probably, one reporting mark… then you will find that there are exceptions.
If you could get close enough you would see codes on the red warning diamonds which you could get translated… but you probably wouldn’t be able to read these on your models (what scale are you)… and you might easily meet up with security / police / Homeland Security. People are a bit nervous these days.
Your best bet is to look for Walthers and MDC/Roundhouse tank cars for your era. You’ll find some of Walthers modern tanks come in 1 and 2 packs and they re-run the popular ones occassionally… but you’ll often struggle to get more than 6 in one reporting mark with different numbers. The MDC 50’ modern tanks mostly seem to have come in single numbers occasionally… but every so often they changed the number… so, if you hunt around you can find different ones. they also did TankTrain cars in lots of numbers but these cars can be a real problem to put together.
Both Walthers and Atlas do long 33,000gal tankcars for LPG.
You could try to match what you see at the refinery with pics in the on line catalogues.
It depends on the location of the refinery and its product mix. Most of what is produced by refineries is transportation fuel – diesel fuel and gasoline – which has a final destination, for the most part, of a service station or truck stop. Thus refineries ship most of their product via pipeline to distribution terminals for trucking to final destination, and truck to local customers. Some diesel fuel and gasoline moves by rail to distant distribution terminals that are not pipeline served. As example, most of the Western Slope of Colorado and Eastern Utah is not reached by pipeline. The Conoco and Total refineries in Denver ship 40-70 cars daily of diesel fuel and gasoline to two distribution terminals in Grand Junction, from where final transportation is by truck. But some fuel also comes into this market by truck from the BP, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, and Flying J refineries in North Salt Lake City, the Sinclair refinery in Sinclair, Wyoming, and the independent refinery at Roosevelt, Utah.
Many refineries also produce LPG, most of which moves by rail to distribution terminals. Other product streams that move mostly by rail include petroleum coke (moving in covered hoppers).
Petrochemical feed stocks ideally move by pipeline to an adjacent petrochemical plant, but many refineries that are specialized for producing feed stocks move them by tankcar to a variety of destinations. KCS, for instance, moves about 100 cars a day between refineries and petrochem plants in Beaumont, Texas, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Refineries producing petrochem feed stocks are generally located in the Gulf Coast, upper Midwest, and New Jersey, where there are industrial consumers. Western and northern refineries haven’t got any customers for petrochemicals for the most part, except for some plastics precursors on the West Coast.
In broad terms, if a tankcar-carried commodity moves less than 200 miles, it moves by truck, and if the custome
What are petrochem feedstocks please? You don’t mean that Ronald MacD’s steers are fed hydrocarbons do you?
I was wondering about plastic pellet cars? What’s petroleum coke? A coal-type fuel made from sludge or the raw material for that drink in a funny shaped bottle? (have you seen what it does to a tooth overnight)? (I reckon that’s got to be chemical…)
Petroleum coke is nearly pure carbon, solid, derived from petroleum distallation and cracking residues, which is used for fuel or in the manufacture of various things such as carbon-arc electrodes and batteries depending upon its source stocks and processing. It is not suitable for blast furnaces for smelting iron because it is too soft. It can also be relatively high in sulfur content. Petroleum coke is a “last-chance” product from a refinery, from heavy (long-chain) fractions of the crude or intermediate processes that are uneconomical to form into high-value products such as gasoline or diesel fuel. Pet coke comes in varieties such as green coke, calcined coke, and needle coke. Refineries with heavy, sour feedstocks are more likely to make pet coke than refineries with light, sweet feedstocks (sweet = low-sulfur; sour = high-sulfur; weight refers to viscosity and specific gravity).
Refineries as a rule don’t make plastic pellets. Those come from petrochemical plants. However, petrochem plants are often co-located with refineries. Plastic pellets are shipped in high-cube covered hoppers.
Petrochem feedstocks are generally liquids or gases produced by a refinery, such as ethylene, propylene, butadiene, benzene, toluene, and xylene, and their derivatives. They are used to make plastics, fertilizer, pesticides, insecticides, synthetic fibers, and dyes, and a lot of other things, too.
I think you need to do some reading and observing for a start. Wikipedia and other on line services should be able to give you a better understanding of what goes on in a refinery. While smaller than steel mills modern refineries still cover vast areas of real estate and are difficult to model well. As to what goes out of one read the side of tank cars the next time you are railfanning. If it isn’t vegetable oil or corn syrup there is a good chance it came from a refinery.
Very few tankcars are permanently marked as to contents. The placard gives in some cases the specific commodity, and in all cases the commodity group, which will probably be good enough for your purposes. A guide to placards is here. The full text is 2.8M, by the way.
Nobody mentioned asphalt, sulfur, or ammonia. Not that sulfur or ammonia seem to be major byproducts of refineries.
Also, the refineries out here I have seen ship petroleum coke ship it in open top hoppers. It seems like I heard MRL bought their open top hoppers to haul petroleum coke out of the Exxon’s Billings refinery. It seems like calcined coke it shipped in covered hoppers. I don’t know about in other places, but is seems like out here the calciners are seperate from the refineries.
Have a look at http://www.sjr.com/ for some other products. Also, look over various petroleum company websites.
You could also model a natural gas liquids plant (fractionator). I have seen them ship LPG, natural gasoline, liquid hydrocarbon not otherwise specified (natural gas condensate?), and pentane in tankcars.
The refineries that are in the same complex as petrochemical plants that make plastics would be way to huge to model, probably even in Z scale. I would guess the smallest one is the BP (formerly ARCO) refinery and ARCO Polypropylene (or whatever it is called now) in Carson, CA. It appears to be a little less than 1 square mile, which would require approximately 3683 square feet to model in HO scale (about 60.69’ x 60.69’ if it is square) or 576 square feet in Z scale (if I remember the scale correctly, 1:220). If you have more space than you know what to do with, you could model the ExxonMobil Baton Rouge complex.
Don’t forget naphtha. LPG is also used as a feedstock. To be technical, the feedstocks you listed are also considered petrochemicals, since (if they were 100% pure) they are each a single molecule type. Naphtha and LPG both contain various types of molecules.
Also, ethanol coming into the refinery in tankcars is common out here. Of course, in the 1990s, it would have been methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE).
I will also occasionally see some cars carrying gasoline. Just a few days ago I saw probably about half a dozen of them. Probably taking non-CARB gasoline out of state or bringing CARB gasoline into the state. These are usually the 33,000 gallon pressure cars. I also used to see 30,000 general service c
Most of the cars will probably be leased from various different leasing companies. Also, with all of the mergers, most oil companies have multiple reporting marks for their own cars, although they seem to be standarding on just one or two.
What is the world coming to when even the figures on your own layout harass you?[;)] It is almost as bad as a shruberer being mugged.
I have not seen the MDC tankcars in a while. Hopefully Athearn will release
The have a number of loading sheds on the property. There is some sort of holding yard on the property as well. The BNSF yard is adjacent to this refinery and I have seen the yard jobs that move long strings of cars to the holding yard and understand this is done a couple times a day. The refinery has their own power that moves the tank cars from that yard to the various loading sheds.
The most common type of tank car I see is no longer than 50-55 feet. So I don’t think they are loading LPG, but, I am not sure what cars can take that, so I profess that I just don’t know what is in them. For that matter, I am not sure if they are loading or unloading the cars in the sheds.
My idea was to have two loading sheds with two tracks each that could hold 4-6 50’(or so) tank cars each for a total of 16-24 loads or spots for this industry. The holding tracks are going to be 2 tracks capable of holding 8-10 cars each thus close to the capacity of the loading shed tracks. This is planned to be a large industry that will have its own train assigned to it (it is quite aways from my yard), and will require 3 trains in a 24hr period. Like I said, a large industry producing a lot of loads. In fact my layout is based on the concept of having a few large industries instead of a bunch of smaller ones.
I am in total agreement with the fact that I need to become more educa
That big building to the right of the green arrow is probably a lube plant. So those cars are probably carrying various lubricating oils.
The black area up top is the coker. It looks like those hoppers are open top, but I cannot tell for sure. I use Walthers 4-bay (kit) and Bowser open top hoppers for the coke plant on my layout.
50’ to 55’ cars will usually carry commodities such as asphalts, lube oils, gas oils, heavy fuel oils, heavy cut naphthas. Note that some of these have flash points high enough that they do not require placards. Asphalt usually gets a white placard with HOT or 3257 on it. Other placards that are common on these size cars are 1202 (fuel oil) and 1993 (flammable liquid not otherwise specified). Santa Fe and Southern Pacific owned some tankcars in this size range to haul diesel fuel.
If you do not have any industries for the corn syrup tankcars and the refinery processes sour crude, repaint the corn syrup tankcars for sulfur.
Texas Railroad Commission commodity statistics for 1950s show only very small proportion of rail traffic used for moving crude to refineries (most by pipleine)
Rails moved many products OTHER THAN oil and gasoline to and from refineries…
sulphuric acid used in refining (special acid tank cars)
“spent” sulphuric acid returned to chem. plant for recycling
tetraethyl lead antiknock compound used 1920s up until time leaded gasoline was outlawed
several plants in Houston area.
(see history of ETHYL Corporation)
industrial gases such as acetylene, Argon, Carbon Dioxide, Neon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, etc. (sometimes in XT box tank cars, ie. tank inside boxcar body.
Gulf sold ammonia produced from petroleum to Spencer Chemical of
I appreciate everyone’s input. The knowledge available here is awsome. I will continue my research, I have a better sense as where to start thanks to everyone’s help.
when the New York Central served the Shell Oil Co. refinery at Wood River / Roxana Illinois we hauled a lot of petroleum lube oil and transmission fluid in tank cars. believe it or not a lot of the lube oil went to Rouseville and Oil City Pennsylvania. (guess who they were selling it to) the transmission fluid went to Hydra-Matic div. of GM at Ypsilanti Michigan. don’t overlook box cars loaded with packaged products like motor oil in cans or drums. Amoco and Clark also gave us a lot of traffic from that area although we did not switch their refineries. I think Clark had a coking unit and we also got a few tank cars of molten sulfur but i don’t remember where they all went. The Shell Wood River refinery was one of the largest around and we had a yard engine stationed inside the plant that just served the switching needs of that one refinery. it worked second trick only (3-11 pm) the railroad also had a clerk full time at Shell to take care of the switch lists, billing, etc. i never saw any crude oil inbound, it came to the refineries by pipeline. with the nation’s pipeline system pretty much connecting everything by now, any bulk product will usually go out that way. different products can be moved through the same pipeline seperated by big rubber balls called “pigs” without cross contamination. but lube oil, asphalt and the like are mostly shipped via rail or truck since they represent a small portion of a refinery’s output and are not candidates for terminal operations like gasoline and heating oil. (diesel fuel without the road tax) barges are also a major competitor to rail transportation if the refinery is located on a navigable waterway.
Some of the inbound tank cars could contain ethanol for E10/E85 or food derived oil for bio-diesel (B20)mixing. I think it would be refinery dependent.