i want to add an ho scale bulk fuel oil distributor to my fictional Leelanau County Railway, what is the most modern of fuel oil distributor kits to use? does either walthers’ mc graw or interstate fuel oil distributor kits have the rack for unloading tankcars, and if so which unloading stand is most up to date? i will be using 54’ funnel flow tankcars
The Interstate kit is light on tank car unloading. There’s only the single unloading tower with two pivoting booms. There’s no rack. The kit has a nice set of horizontal tanks with a lot of piping, but it’s really set up for loading tank trucks, not dealing with a lot of tank cars. There are 2 more vertical tanks, and a quonset hut office as well. Nice kit, but I don’t think it’s exactly what you’re looking for.
Perhaps I’m displaying my ignorance, but over the last several decades, piplines and trucks have eliminated the need for the petroleum distribution plant models available.
Regardless, for the up-to-mid-twentieth-century modeling, I prefer Grandt Line’s kits, particularly because there are no joints in the middle of the tanks which would take the majority of assembly time to make disappear. I built the Walthers kit too, but considered the resulting model a waste of time since my patience wasn’t quite up to it. The Grandt kit came out fine.
Most tank cars carrying petroleum products could be unloaded from top or bottom. Those “cranes” supplied for kits are for unloading from the top, using suction. If unloading from the bottom, there would be pipes, valves and hoses which can be modeled from various manufactured parts
Mark.
I combined two of the tank sets with Grandt’s warehouse to make my mid-twentieth century petroleum distribution model. Added some ground-level pipes for detail, as well as fences.
Mark
PS – This will be MY LAST POST ON TRAiNS.COM until this website is fixed. I’m not going to waste my time waiting five minutes to doomsday waiting for a page changes. I spent half-an-hour trying to make this post. When turnaround returns to two to five seconds, I’ll be back. Until then, I’ll miss you guys.
From my knowledge, rail deliveries to oil distributors ceased at the beginning of WW II . From that time it has been TT (truck transport). Walthers had or has a modern TW (tank wagon) or tank truck loading rack part # 933-3769. My layout has a oil distributor on it and I’m using a little poetic liscense and doing it the way I want it to look. As the saying goes, “It’s your railroad”
Bob.
Mark,
I guess timing is every thing as I logged on a few minutes ago and it has been super fast. I did have problems last night.
We will miss your contributions to the forum so I hope you will return soon or better yet not leave. I’ve learned a lot from guys like you.
Bob
I’m interested in what you end up doing. I model relatively modern era (1980-mid '90s) granger ops and have a few of the Atlas 23500 gallon ACF tank cars, one in MOBX (Mobil) and two ACFX, but sublettered for Amoco. I understand these could be used in some sort of fuel service, but like was mentioned earlier pipelines and eighteen-wheeler tank trucks carried the lions-share of fuel traffic by this late date.
Still, running a few tank cars around will break up the “monotony” of long strings of covered hoppers on my railroad. Besides the tank cars mentioned above, I also have a small fleet of ACFX and CNTX 33K gallon LPG tank cars for local propane distributors. I hope Walthers re-releases the LPG dealer kit too.
Growing up in the 60’s & 70’s, there was a pipeline terminal not far from my home. There were still loading out a lot of tank cars for distribution to local dealors into the early 70s before the trucks took everything over. Heck there were even a couple of small coal dealors receiving hoppers in the winter selling home heating coal. Can’t give an exact time, but both the coal and oil shipments to local distributors petered out in the early 70’s, probably by 74-75.
I think your are looking for Walthers oil loading platform 933-3104. Its what I used on my refinery.
It was the most modern that I could find for what I needed.
Well, I don’t know about WWII because we had a couple of distributors into the early 70s. However, here is one that I put together for about 1968-70.
What are you looking to do? Add a few cars to switch each session? If so, a “LARGE” operation might be overkill.
There’s no reason you can’t model spill pans, an unloading track (or two!) and the various hoses and pipe systems that lead to a fuel transfer pump. Unloading can happen direct from tank-to-truck, even. If it’s a small operation, that may be all you would normally see, as well.
There’s an oil distribution site in Bloomington MN that I go by often that is just a dirt lot with a small / medium size metal shack as an office, a small tank truck loading platform, and a one-truck weigh station. The tanks are apparently all underground. There are no platforms next to the siding for the tank cars, it maybe just has a couple of nozzle connections for hoses alongside the track for unloading, nothing really clearly visible. In all it only takes up the space of a normal house lot next to the tracks.
There maybe no tanks because the tank car is the holding tank. When the tank car is getting close to empty they order another one and when the next car gets delivered the empty one is taken away.
Rod
Another thing that I forgot to post. It is not an oil distributor ship, but a lot of fertilizer, maybe even some propane, is stilled delivered in tank cars to farm (Coops) stores.
Rod