LPG Tank Car

Before we get to the LPG tank car, here's a photo I took of a small warehouse building after the train show in Woodstock last year.  It looks to me like it would be a good subject for a not terribly difficult backdrop project.

Using the 20 foot shipping container as a rough guide, the building appears to be about 80 feet across, and 16 feet tall, plus the height of the foundation and crumbling loading dock. Looks to me that most of the siding has a bit of a blueish tone to it, and then there is the slightly more grey colour in the area surrounding the white overhead door. The personnel door to it's left blends in almost perfectly.  And that's a mailbox to the right of the large door.

Rail fanning this week along the JSSX, found this Union Tank Car built tanker as part of a train that was involved in switching operations at some of the industries along the nearby GTW tracks.

Here's the tank car on the workbench, partway through my patching and weathering efforts.

When I set this car on the layout, it consistently de-railed going around a the curve at one end, sometimes taking another car or two off the rails with it.  My other cars all go around the curve in question with no problems.  It turned out that the centre section of the trucks were hitting into those little nub things, which in this photo below can be seen just to the right of the hole for the truck screw. The trucks weren't able to rotate far enough to get around the curve.

I thought that I'd just cut those nubs off with an Xacto knife, but it turns out that they are actually metal, so that idea didn't work.  Instead, I carved away a little bit from the centre bar of each truck, allowing the trucks to rotate just a little bit more, but it's enough to allow the tank car make it around the curves with no trouble at all.

I took a spin by "C-Yard" here in Sarnia yesterday.  The yard is always chock-full of tank cars, and sure enough there was a UTC built tank car very similar to my model.  I took this picture, but as there was a snow streamer coming off the lake just then, and...well, the picture tells you what conditions were like at the time...

There's currently no place on the layout that would be either a destination or origin for a 33000 gallon LPG tank car of Methylamine Anhydrous (whatever that is, it's labelled as such on the tank), so I think that this one will not likely be seen on the rails here very often.