My layout, set in 1953, includes a modest engine terminal in the town of Shumala, with a turntable, two-stall roundhouse, and a sand house, along with water and oil columns for locomotive servicing. The columns, of course, are fed from storage tanks. The water is assumed to be provided by the town water system, but the fuel oil is brought in by tank car, thus there is a fuel spot to unload those cars. For more about the engine terminal itself, you may wish to look at my article in Model Railroad Hobbyist, August 2017.
The Shumala water tank is a Harriman standard design, imported years ago in brass by Overland. It’s shown below, painted black as was SP practice for steel tanks, alongside my Banta Model Works roundhouse. At the right edge of this view is the pump house for the water tank, an extra building from the Walthers oil dealer kit for McGraw Oil.
To make a storage tank for fuel oil (for SP, this was Bunker C, a viscous product that had to be heated to flow through piping to the firebox), I used an empty bottle of carpenter’s glue, with the top cut off, and with a wrapper of thin styrene with impressed rivet rows, to make a storage tank. I added a ladder to the tank top and an access hatch along with an SP medallion. The oil pump house is another building from McGraw Oil that I didn’t use with my Associated Oil model (see Model Railroad Hobbyist, March 2014).
The tank car you see above has the aluminum end stripe that SP used to designate cars assigned to diesel fuel service. In the foreground above, incidentally, is my scratchbuilt sand house, made following SP drawings for such buildings (see my article in Model Railroad Hobbyist, for January 2021).
To the right of the black fuel oil tank in the photo above is a smaller silver tank. This tank stores diesel fuel, with a clearer view of it below. I described building this tank, with color and label following an SP tank I photographed at West Oakland, in a previous blog post (you can find it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2022/12/adding-storage-tanks.html ).
The car at left below, probably delivering Bunker C fuel, is at the actual unloading spot. It is a generic black SP tank car, thus not in assigned service. The car is one of my several conversions of Athearn tank cars to accurate SP models. These Athearn conversions have been described in a full article about the process at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/05/modeling-sp-tank-cars.html ).
In addition to the end stripe on tank cars in diesel fuel service, there was also an all-aluminum scheme for this service, and in the early 1950s cars in both schemes were common. Here is an example of another Athearn conversion, lettered with the decal set I designed (now available from Tichy). This is the right side of the car, which correctly lacks dome walkway and grab iron.
In addition to providing a source for the fuel and water columns in the engine servicing area, the Bunker C and diesel fuel storage tanks are destinations for loaded tank cars, adding a little more switching around the engine terminal. Here’s an example waybill. Though SP mostly bought petroleum products from Chevron, they purchased from other oil companies also.
These parts of my engine terminal have worked out well. Though simple, they complete the logic of fuel and water supply, and as mentioned, are also an unloading destination.
Tony Thompson
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