Tank Cars: Industrial Oils

Other petroleum products fall under the category of Refined Petroleum, NOS. 

Lubricating and Cutting Oils

A common product required by the many machine shops and manufacturers of New Britain is lubricating or cutting oil. These could be shipped via box car in 55-gallon drums. It could also be delivered via truck from a regional distributor such as L.F. Powers Co. in Waterbury.  But with the amount required by some of these industries, I think it's reasonable to consider tank cars too.

These types of oil would not require heater coils or insulation and would be carried in general service tank cars. 

The major gasoline and oil companies also produced lubricating oils in their refining processes. This Tangent car is lettered for Sinclair. I particularly wanted to use the Proto 2000 Socony-Vacuum car for its attractive Mobilgas scheme.

Any of the other general service cars, with or without lagging (insulation) or heater coils can be assigned for this service too.

Coal Tar

There is also a petroleum product that I can potentially ship out from New Britain. Town Gas companies, like the New Britain Gas Light Co., generated a lot of coal tar.  This is a byproduct of both the coal gas and carburetted water gas process. In turn, coal tar could be used to make creosote, road or roofing tar, solvents, and some early plastics such as Bakelite.

This Koppers tank car is a Red Caboose model. This model is accurate for only a handful of prototypes for SL-SF, USAX, JTBX, SHPX (for Bakelite), and, conveniently, Koppers. For some reason, though, all of the available models are lettered for the wrong series, and the reporting marks are wrong. It should be KPCX 2500-2522 for the 23 cars built in 1951. I also have a couple of kits to build and I'll correct the reporting marks and road numbers.

Also note that Intermountain has released their Type 27 tank car in the Koppers livery. I don't have any information on the other builds of tank cars, other than this series was insulated, unlike the Intermountain model.

Of the ex-Red Caboose 10,000 gallon welded tank cars that Intermountain produces, the only scheme that is accurate is the USAX (US Army) one. 

Another one they could run is the SHPX 16754-16773 series with heater coils that was leased to the Bakelite division of Union Carbide. They would have received coal tar from town gas operations too. Their factory was in Bound Brook, NJ with another plant opened in Marietta, OH in 1951.

Coal tar was shipped to Koppers Tar & Chemical Division facilities in Everett, MA and Providence, RI. The Everett facility was owned and operated by Barrett in '20s. I didn't find a date for when it switched to a Koppers operation, but it was before my modeling era. 

Baird & McGuire in Holbrook, MA also purchased coal tar from town gas companies in the region. They would use cars from GATX, SHPX, or UTLX. The Bakelite plant in NJ is another potential destination. 

Heater coils were required to be able to unload the thick coal tar. Lagging may or may not be used. Around 80% of the Koppers owned cars were insulated, and all had heater coils.

General service cars with heater coils would also be used in this service.