I am busy assembling the Interstate Fuel & Oil kit, and so far so good, but I have a question about how oil would have been delivered to a fuel distributor like this. The kit includes a small rack assembly with two pivoting arms which I assume is the fixture that would be located trackside. My questions are whether this fixture is true to prototype, and if so, exactly how did the pivoting arms connect to a tank car to remove its contents?
Does anyone here have any answers to these questions, or can you point me to a website where I can find what I’m looking for?
By looking at the illustration in the catalogue it appears to me that the “pivoting arms” you refer to are for loading retail delivery trucks and not for receiving railcar deliveries. I believe that deliveries by rail would be off loaded via the bottom of a tank car and pumped to the holding tanks above ground.
I have that kit in HO, but have never broken the cellophane. But from real life experiance passing a very similar real life opperation 4 times a day, to and from school (home and back for lunch), for 8 years, what they used was the rough equivalent of flexable fire hoses or the hoses used by gasoline tankers to fill the tanks at local stations. There were hook-up pipes track-side, that went to a small valve/pump shed, and from there to the tanks. As has been noted, the pivoting arms were for storage tank to delivery truck opperations.
We had a long discussion about this a few months back, prompted by my own purchase of the same kit. Yes, some tank cars are unloaded from the bottom, but if you look closely you’ll see many of them don’t even have valves down there. I suspect it’s a safety issue, because it would be very hard to do anything about a broken valve if the tank were full of fluid.
Instead, the top of the car contains two pipes. One is used to pump compressed air into the car, while the other draws the oil out, either just from the pressure or under suction. The output has a pipe which goes to the bottom of the car, and is referred to as an “eduction pipe.” Once the flow is started, it will continue on its own with siphoning action, assuming that the tank car sits higher than the reservoir it’s going into.
The little rack should have hoses on each end, but those are not included. At the top end, the two hoses would connect to the car. At the bottom end, one would go to the reservoir being filled, and the other to the compressed air supply.
Now, I’ll admit that all of this is deduction on my part, but it all fits together. If anyone has actually seen one of these things in action, we’d appreciate any corrections and additions. Thanks a lot in advance.
Most petroleum tank cars from the 50’s were unloaded from the top(I know there are exceptions). That pivoting arm rig is used to unload them The hose is attached at the top or dropped in. The piping included in the it goes to the ‘pump house’(that small structure that looks like a phone booth). It then moves the oil to the storage tanks. The truck unloading facility(with the plumbing) is used to load the tank trucks for delivery.
It’s a top unloader. It is the same one that is included in the diesel fueling kit. This is how I modeled it. A hose is placed in the tank car via the top and the contents are pumped out.
This is actually the third time around for this discussion. I started one last year regarding the same device on the diesel fueling facility. It would have been nice if Walthers included a few hoses for it as well as a description of how it worked in the documention. I don’t think very many of us could have figured it out on their own. If I remember right, the picture of the diesel facility on the kit box showed the device without any hoses.
I had a very old 1960’s Revell engine sand, fuel facility and fashioned a hose out of a peice of 12 gauge wire painted weathered black (Insulation and all) and a bracket for it out of two peices of syrene poles chopped down and a third for a angle brace and stuck the whole thing into one of the sand pots. After checking to see it clear the engines that are expected to use the service Im pleased.
While this post does not address the subject of the Walthers Fuel kit, I do plan to have one of these next to the King and Sons Coal facility at some point in the future.
Thanks for the feedback so far. Clearly, it would be best if someone were to dig up a photograph of one of these in use, but so far most of the replies seem to support my speculations on how these worked.
