For some a 'less thought intensive' project while keeping up with work, light duty due to the shoulder and Railbox's hospitalization, this little project came out over the weekend. Hopefully it will get done this weekend. It is a fiddly kit full of tiny parts, It has a gearbox for those who will animate it, not me though, This Grandt line house will become a service shed for it, Making progress, It's future location just above the shipping plant,
It's fun little kit. I didn't motorize mine - yours is coming along wonderfully. Here's one of mine: Thanks, Wolf
I have a few unbuilt kits and a built-up RTR one to guide me on the proper constuction. The built-up is motorized too. I really don't understand what these pumps were actually 'pumping' since they are usually not in an active oil field with derricks... in fact often found scatterred about with no other oil production facilty or equipment. Sent from my SM-J737T using Tapatalk
They pull the crude out of the well and into either a pipeline, mostly underground today, or into a tank nearby.
Derricks are for drilling; wells stay active long after. Here are a couple of @badlandnp's "tank nearby" scenarios.
Thanks for the pics! The neatest thing is seeing all the different trucks show up at a drill site, put the rig together and up, with all the guy wires going every which way. Then just watching the rig hands do there thing as the pipe goes down to the oil. Then, after all the hub-bub is over, we have either a well cap or it has a pumpjack doing it's thing lonesomely and faithfully.
Pump jacks usually need at least a small reservoir tank to even out the flow to a pump that pushes the oil into a pipeline. If no pipeline is available, then a larger tank is used to collect the oil for transfer to a tanker truck/trailer. Newer wells have berms around the tanks to contain any spill or fire. They usually prevent fires by keeping the spilled oil from reaching a source of combustion. The berm has to be able to contain all the oil capable of being stored in the tank. The existing wells were exempt when the berm requirements were created. When I was a kid in the mid-1970's, my brother took us siblings "out for ice cream" with a clandestine detour to see a huge, burning oil tank in a tank farm on the north side of Pasadena TX (near Houston). It looked like a blackened, fallen cake, with deep orange flames and opaque black smoke billowing up into the air. We parked to watch it from over half a mile away, and could feel the heat from the fire. Lightning from a thunderstorm had ignited the fire. Had it not been for the containment berms, the fire would have spread to all the tanks (at least half a dozen, IIRC) in the farm.
Spent a bit of time last nite running the 2511 and train at a scale 10mph around the whole layout. Took it just over 25 minutes, which allowed me to work on one of the switch toggles. I put in a plate around the top to hold it in place. Also found a problem with a different one, which was acting like a dead spot for obvious reasons. And took apart the S2 drivers a few days ago to see what I can do to improve pickup there. Hmmm.
And, did some test running after reassembling the S2 with 'neolube' on the axle bearing points for the drivers. It seemed to help some. There do appear to be a few balance issues with the drivers that I have to play with yet, but it was fun to pull a couple of laps with the train!
I have three of those Walther's "Cricket Pumps" on my layout and I tried to motorize the first one I built. The problem with this is that the real things use a large flywheel-mass to get the walking beam through top-dead-center and bottom-dead-center and our little models don't have that. Instead, they rely on the gears to do the job and those gears are way to course to do that job without a lot of herky-jerky motion; you can practically count the teeth in the drive gear.
Ain't going to animate mine. At least not yet. They are a slow motion thing, and not important to me, yet.
Hmmm.... the UP FEF pulling a mixed assortment of Mainstreeter and NCL varnish... veeerrry interesting! Sent from my SM-J737T using Tapatalk
Calzephr, This is a good video to watch, also the low speed running is very impressive with both steam locomotives! Did you do a lot of track and wheel cleaning to achieve this? - Tonkphilip
Have been trying to collect a good set of NP varnish. Which is rather difficult, unless you just go get C-C stuff. Naaw, even tho I did get a couple of theirs and they seem to be ok for now. I figure I will end up having to just get a handful of unlettered pullman green heavyweights and letter them for the NP. Ah the fun. The Lowell Smith units are nice, but hard to get. My layout is kept fairly clean in it's own trailer. Heat is by woodstove, so a bit of fine ash shows up over time. I did nothing special here to run these guys, the 2511 and 2361 Mikado's are both Model Power units with Loksound installed, and I set the CV's for slow speeds and lots of tweaking on the motor control to keep them slow. They both have about a 50 mph max speed. The 844 is just getting broke in, and needs more tweaking. I did 'gleam' the track with a Stainless steel washer years ago, and do occasionally run my WS cleaning stick around. I only use a bright boy right after soldering or scenery work to get the flux or big stuff off. Most every caboose has a WS dust monkey under it, which occasionally get a bit of alchohol on them. Thanks for the views guys!