Oil Fields, Loading Oil, Facilities Involved?

This, from D&RGW ... simple elevated walkway with discharge hoses. Add tanks as desired. 

Oil wouldn’t normally be loaded from a Derrick, but nodding donkeys would fit right in. 

I had an oil field, storage refinery area on my last layout:

• Two Colber bubbling oil wells (one of which came off my high school train layout)
• Three oil storage tanks (made from vegetable cans, masking tape and spray paint when I was in high school years ago)
• Catcracker (an architectural model I picked up at a train meet for $20)
• Sunoco "neon" sign from Miller Engineering mounted on a "pedestal wall"
• Stub track that could hold two to three tank cars

I plan to have another scene like this on my next layout.

Atlas has a tank car loading model that l found parts of, as l wanted something similar.  So l repaired this kit, built a chain link fence around it, added some horizontal tanks, a couple of locations for pumpjacks and vertical tanks, found Lionel's two tank cars for my favorite defunct oil company, Frontier, and tank trucks so lettered, but hardest thing was finding plain black tank cars for the crude, but did.  The refinery is somewhere over the rainbow.

I've  been working on a small refinery.  Got my ideas  from the Ashland refinery  on the border  of Ky and West Virginia. 

@farmerjohn posted:

I've  been working on a small refinery.  Got my ideas  from the Ashland refinery  on the border  of Ky and West Virginia. 

Whoa!! That is nicer than most public/museum layouts!! Can we get some more pics?

That’s really effective. More pics, please. 

Here you go. Pictures of refinery I constructed for Tony Lash. This should provide some good details for you.

One of the mags, think was RMC, but more logically would have been NG&SLG, had photos and plans of a tiny and primitive Calif. refinery, largely made up of wooden tanks. Not a space gobbler.

That’s a very nice model, good detail - I particularly like the floating tank roofs at different levels. 

Here is a few more pictures of my small refinery.  Still a lot more to do but that will come with time. Looking for an oil badge to put on the river .

I am finally back to this oil field/storage/facilities topic. My trackwork has reached the point where I need to plan layout and scenic space for whatever I want to build. The way this all started was that, while planning my layout maybe 2 years ago, a local guy came along with a BIG pile of Lionel and Rail King oil facility stuff that he has mostly never used. And he was selling the whole lot at a great price. I went for the deal and set all the stuff aside until I got closer to being able to use it. Well, now I am closer...

I inventoried the lot and what I have is just what you would expect in modern, ready-to-use Lionel operating and lit oil facilities. I have 5 derricks, a bunch of horse-head type oil pumps, a group of cylindrical and spherical oil tanks, five of the Lionel elevated storage tanks, animated oil pumping stations and other ends and odds. Almost all of it has never been out of the boxes.

I guess my question is, from a layout scenery perspective, do the derricks have to go near the big tanks? Should the big tanks be grouped together? And then what?--service tracks for tank car loading/unloading at the big oil tanks? And/or service roads for truck access to the oil? Some great work has shown up in the pictures and discussion in this thread. For those who have contributed, I say a big THANKS!

But if anyone reading this can add anything to the discussion and pictures, that would be a big help!

All the best!

Don Merz

Broadly speaking, the horsehead pumps (aka “nodding donkeys”) stand alone or in groups, at the production site. They are linked by pipelines to holding tanks. Some might have derricks over them, most won’t.

The holding tanks will be linked to loading gantries for tankers.

The refinery will be a separate site, with unloading gantries (inbound) and loading gantries (outbound)

When my son worked as a geologist for Occidental Petroleum in Bakersfield California,  he took us out to Kern county to see the oil fields and also the Kern county museum.  In the fields the pump jacks (nodding donkeys) were so numerous that they appeared to be one on top of each other.  There were a few derricks interspersed but they were mostly older units that were not taken down. 

For modeling purposes,  a young oil field will have more derricks than pump jacks,  but an active field will have fewer derricks.

An older field will have few pumps and no derricks but the pumps might have a small upright tank next to it.  You can see examples of this in Southern Illinois where a solitary pump might be standing in a corn or soybean field.

Place your tanks together in a tank farm and put the oil loading platforms close by with a track on each side of the platform. Connect the tanks and platforms with pipes running everywhere.

Westland,  Washington Co., PA  collection site.   Well products are separated at this site. Basic temperature/pressure can remove those gas products that occur as liquid, example propane.  Rail tank cars are short term product movers, until the pipelines can be installed to move product.  Note the collection/separation towers.   Storage tanks middle left.   Picture is at least 10 years old.  A secure site, note the fence.  This site has a relatively large rail yard to accommodate 100 car trains and the power needed to move them.

Yard, beginning construction, I was still allowed bike access.

Piping in a simple oil loading facility.  Office on left, pump house right.

Now, don't ask how the oil got in the tanks...

,

@Mike CT posted:

Westland,  Washington Co., PA  collection site.   Well products are separated at this site. Basic temperature/pressure can remove those gas products that occur as liquid, example propane.  Rail tank cars are short term product movers, until the pipelines can be installed to move product.  Note the collection/separation towers.   Storage tanks middle left.   Picture is at least 10 years old.  A secure site, note the fence.  This site has a relatively large rail yard to accommodate 100 car trains and the power needed to move them.

Yard, beginning construction, I was still allowed bike access.

These pix sure illustrate one of the problems with this project--handling Texas Tea has changed dramatically over the years. If you go back through some pre-war oil field pix, then some post-war and finally modern stuff like this, you wouldn't know what to build! I am firmly in the railroad modeler's choice timeframe -- the Transition Era. I'm not sure why it gets to be called a whole "era" when it lasted at most, 20 years--and 10 is closer to the mark.

Anyway, my oil facilities have to be late-1950's. And if the prototype doesn't follow MY LEAD, well then I'll just PRETEND I am following it's lead!

Don

@wbg pete posted:

Piping in a simple oil loading facility.  Office on left, pump house right.

Now, don't ask how the oil got in the tanks...

,

Thanks Pete. Mine has to be just a bit larger because I am using the pre-built Lionel and MTH tanks for so forth. But your plumbing shown in the pix takes me in the right direction.  Thanks for your kind reply!

Don

@third rail posted:

When my son worked as a geologist for Occidental Petroleum in Bakersfield California,  he took us out to Kern county to see the oil fields and also the Kern county museum.  In the fields the pump jacks (nodding donkeys) were so numerous that they appeared to be one on top of each other.  There were a few derricks interspersed but they were mostly older units that were not taken down.

For modeling purposes,  a young oil field will have more derricks than pump jacks,  but an active field will have fewer derricks.

An older field will have few pumps and no derricks but the pumps might have a small upright tank next to it.  You can see examples of this in Southern Illinois where a solitary pump might be standing in a corn or soybean field.

Place your tanks together in a tank farm and put the oil loading platforms close by with a track on each side of the platform. Connect the tanks and platforms with pipes running everywhere.

Thanks third rail! This is a great summary and helps more than it might seem. Right now I am just trying to allocate precious scenery real-estate and locate access tracks and roads. Your reply helps me understand that I am going to end up with several different sizes of facility.

So maybe a tank farm with larger tanks with one access track and one road. Next, how about a nodding donkey paired with a smaller elevated tank and an access road or track or even maybe both. I could have a few of those grouped together with a working or non-working derrick or two. Then we have a siding somewhere with a retail oil dealer--similar to the kit that walthers used to make in O scale and may still make in HO. Plus of course, the siding in the engine terminal that stores and dispenses fuel for the 1st gen diesels.  Other stuff can be imagined as part of this menagerie. But this would make a decent start.

Many thanks!

Don

@Rockershovel posted:

Broadly speaking, the horsehead pumps (aka “nodding donkeys”) stand alone or in groups, at the production site. They are linked by pipelines to holding tanks. Some might have derricks over them, most won’t.

The holding tanks will be linked to loading gantries for tankers.

The refinery will be a separate site, with unloading gantries (inbound) and loading gantries (outbound)

Thanks rockershovel. The thing I don't get here is what the loading gantry lifts and moves. An oil tank onto a flat car? A loaded tanker trailer lifted onto a flat car TOFC-style?

Like one of the replies said "just don't ask how the oil got INTO those tanks!"

Don

@Don Merz 070317 posted:

Thanks rockershovel. The thing I don't get here is what the loading gantry lifts and moves. An oil tank onto a flat car? A loaded tanker trailer lifted onto a flat car TOFC-style?

Like one of the replies said "just don't ask how the oil got INTO those tanks!"

Don

Oh ok, British English...

This is a loading gantry. Rail tankers almost always use the “top loader” type

If you have the space for a decent sized tank farm,  you can use the cardboard tube form that are used in the concrete industry to make the storage tanks.  Buy them at any big box home improvement store, the largest diameter that will fit, (they come in sizes from 8 to 24 inches). Make them about 12-16 inches tall put on a cardstock roof and paint them.  Heck you can also try cutting out  partial circles and use them for background scenery.

This is what I mean. Dirt cheap and you can get several tanks from one tube.

Several  of the storage tanks on my layout are made from drainage pipe . Some of the smaller ones are made from 3 inch electric  conduit pipe.

... that’s very well observed detail. The elevated walkways, piperacks and valves, all in contrasting primary colours are exactly right, and the lighting is spot-on.

I saw a while ago, washing up liquid bottles used for low-pressure vessels and tanks. They are the right sort of diameter, and have tapered ends with threaded fittings which lend themselves to ALL SORTS of applications.

Lots of detail HERE https://www.madeinmanchestermo...ox=dataItem-j3rbqnxr

How does the oil get in the tanks? Like this! (Sangachal Terminal, Azerbaijan)

All oil is transported to tanks via underground pipes these days.

If you are modeling wartime U.S., before the Big Inch was constructed,  oil from the Southwest was piped to a little sleepy town in Southern Illinois on a New York Central branch line. There  it was held in storage tanks until it could be loaded in to tank cars for the trip East for refining and distribution. Oil had to go by land because Nazi submarines laying off the coast were torpedoing any ship carrying oil-trying to starve the war effort.