Oil Refinery Carloadings

[Yard Goat]

First post to The Gauge!

I'm bashing around ideas for an oil refinery plan for my HO modular club (Hi Bob and Andrew), but I'm severely hampered by my near total ignorance of how refineries and railroads interact. Wondering if anybody here has advice or suggestions on where to go looking for more information.

I'm assuming modern-period, but selectively compressed to an extreme degree. Since the crude arrives via pipeline, I guess the only significant inbound traffic would be fuel additives (in e.g. funnel-flow tank cars). Outbound I have no clue. Is there such a thing as a refinery that only ships LPG by rail, or would it ship a variety of products in many different types of railcar?

Appreciate any and all input I can get.

AJ

 

[Hoghead]

One product that is an outbound shipment besides tank cars of liquidfied petroleum gas in tank cars is coke. Empty open top hoppers are placed underneath the "coker". Coke is loaded along with water to keep the loading fluid. The cars are then pulled out from underneath the coker for shipment and they usually leak water for days afterwards. This has got to be the dirtiest job in the refinery.

Coke should be very easy to model since it resembles coal and is loaded in open top hopper cars like coal.

Also within the refinery for loading is a tank loading platform for lube oil and liquidfied petroleum gas.

You can model a refinery located on the water front where all inbound crude comes in via oil tankers. All inbound rail traffic would be empty tanks and hopper (if you wish to do the coke loading)

 

[tweet469]

I worked at a plasticizer plant. Basically, similiar to a refinery, but they reacte chemicals to make synthetic oils. Inbound tankcars of alcohol such as hexanol were unloaded to storage tanks. 48" X 48" X 48" super sacks of powered chemicals came in on trucks and boxcars. Finished product left in tank cars. One chemical came in in tank cars, but it was frozen. Steam had to be applied for several days to the jacketed coils on the tanker before it could be offloaded. Pretty interesting operation.