Tank car traffic comes to the N Scale Middle Division!

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
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April 2007: Tank car traffic comes to the N Scale Middle Division!

I’ve been working on an effective operating scheme for my layout using a train sequence and car cards/waybills, and it occurred to me that I had no destination on-line for tank cars. So, Wm. T. Schaeffer Feed and Coal Co. of Lewisport now sells fuel oil and propane.

I added Walther’s new Industrial Tanks set (part of their new modular structure line). Here you can see five of the six tanks from the kit. Each got a different color and different weathering so that they appear to have been installed at different times. I imagine the white tank is for propane, and the others for various grades of heating oil. Here, an H10sa 2-8-0 delivers a tank car of heating oil down the oil-soaked track.

Granted, none of these tanks really seem large enough to warrant a full tank car load, but I also didn’t want to overwhelm the scene with giant tanks. After all, this scene appears right behind LEW Interlocking, which is an important scene in its own right.

Here’s the close-up. I figured rather than putting all the tanks straight on the ground, at least a few of them should rest on some sort of containment platform. Then again, this is 1956, not 2007, so environmental protection requirements were somewhat less stringent…

I thought it might look strange to put all six of the tanks in one spot, so the sixth tank found its way to the other side of Lewisport and now rests comfortably in a coat of rust beside the Juniata Machine Tool Company.

Again, I really don’t know what this tank does… but it looks nice and industrial! The overhead pipe is part of the sprue the tank parts came on.

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Nice job, Dave.

I’m going to be modeling the Hercules plant here in Brunswick, GA and need LOTS of various sized tanks. That new set looks like it’ll help.

I agree with you on that last tank outside the building. Who knows what it is, but it looks like it MUST do something!![:D]

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That sixth tank reminds me of some kind of dust collector more than a tank. I guess you could say it’s part of the filtration system for the building.

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I was thinking the same thing. There’s several sawdust collectors I’ve seen that look quite similar.

Nice work Dave! It all looks real good!

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Some larger printing plants have shredded paper collectors that look like that.

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"it occurred to me that I had no destination on-line for tank cars. "

If you have provision for STAGING on your layout, you can always have tank cars (or any other car for which you have no on-layout switching location) for by as bridge traffic in through trains. However, then you only get to see them for a short length of time while train is zipping through…

Another way to use cars where there is no on-layout shipper or destination-- this also uses staging- is to imagine a local peddler way freight that switches spurs in your modeled scene and which ALSO goes on to service another town beyond that is non-modeled but represented in storage. This way, an interesting car gets to “show off” more visibly, all the time the local peddler is “in town”.

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“Propane, and propane accessories.”

Very nice work!

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Right. I have been running tank cars in through- and way freights from staging, but I wanted an excuse to set one out from time to time.

Now Schaeffer’s receives hoppers and tank cars and ships boxcars. Not bad for one small spur.