This pair of PIKO tanks are from an HO scale kit but they work well for the storage tanks at a small town retail yard. Adjacent 1:48 scale details, walkways, ladders and sheds ef- fectively “re-scale” them. The track side is to the right in the abovephoto and in front be- low. The pump house would have either an electric motor or gasoline engine inside.
situation. Additionally, I had to consid- er the real estate I had available on my layout. The oil yard would be served by a siding close to the edge of the layout, in the town of Bigelow, that also func- tions as a team track of sorts. This would make switching interesting in an already limited area, but it also meant that the overall size and loca- tion of the various structures in the dealer’s space would be restricted. With these factors in mind, I set about to create O’Brien Oil. Without a lot of actual data in hand, and admittedly not much knowledge of the workings of the oil industry, my ref- erence material was limited. I looked on line but most of the sites dealt with large facilities. Accordingly, much of what I created is likely not prototypi- cal. I may have even created some dan- gerous conditions for the employees. I did find a couple of magazine articles that were of some help. One was a piece by the late Gordon North that ap- peared in the Nov./Dec., 1998 issue of the Narrow Gauge and Short Line Gazette. This article gave me some gen- eral ideas about structures and layout. The other reference was an article by Bob Bennett–wait, that’s me–in the May, 1998, RMC. Back in my HOn3 days I built another small oil dealer- ship and for the article I had taken some photos of a couple of local dealers here in Maine. These and some dimen- sions that I used on that model came in handy, but, for this incarnation, I first needed a couple of tanks.
I had at one time assembled and RAILROAD MODEL CRAFTSMAN
painted two fairly large HO tanks. I be- lieve they were from PIKO, but I’m not sure. I had donated them to the modu- lar club I play around with, and with members’ permission, I reclaimed them. In O scale, they measure about 20 feet tall by 11 feet in diameter. Looking at my HO article, I decided that I would space the tanks far enough apart to place the pump house between and slightly in front of them and the tank car off-loading rack in the same relative position in the rear. This spacing between tanks came out to about 14 feet. The truck loading rack is
about six feet to the side and slightly ahead of the pump house. These five structures, and a small tank of unknown origin, pretty well fill up a thin plywood base that measures six by twelve actual inches. The office and shed are off the base. None of these dimensions, obvious- ly, are critical, and you can locate things to your own needs or desires. I used styrene sheet and strip for just about all of the construction. The office building, pump house and the sides and rear of the truck loading dock are all built of Evergreen styrene No. 4530 metal siding. Again, dimen- sions aren’t critical, but for these build- ings, they are as follows. The office is 14′×14′ with the front wall 8′-0″ high, sloping to 7′-0″ at the rear. The pump house is 9′×9′, 8′-0″ high at the front and 6′-6″ at the rear. The truck loading dock is 4′-6″ wide and 10′-6″ long, slop- ing from 12′-0″ at the front to 10′-0″ at the back. This dock is framed with sev- eral sizes of styrene strip distressed to resemble wood and has a scribed styrene lower front wall with an access door of styrene hinged with Grandt Line parts. The photo of the interior of the office shows the simple construc- tion of these buildings. The windows in each of the closed structures are left- over Grandt Line narrow gauge ca- boose windows from set No. 49. These three buildings were painted with a coat of Testors Light Aircraft Gray, oversprayed with Testors Dullcote, and weathered with an alcohol and india ink wash and a light dusting of rust- colored pastel chalks. Before installing the roof on the loading dock, I located and drilled holes for the piping. The roofing mate- rial for this and the pump house is JTT
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