I need help.. i have a 18''x36'' spot set aside for my oil refinery i was just wondering if any of you out there would have any good ideas as how i should lay this out and what not. i was going to use walthers oil refinery kit and tanks and kit bash them, mabie cut the tanks in half and use them against the back drop. any photo's or ideas would be great. oh and i model in HO cw
Refineries are so large, it seems you'll need to decide: what would you like to emphasize? Loading areas? The maze of pipes? The tall stacks? The huge storage tanks? A little of each? I've seen loading areas completely separate from the refinery, on a dirt lot all its own, and I've seen loading racks slap bang in the thick of things. I also have pictures of all of the above, but they are too many and too big to upload them all...
My oil industry has unloading platforms along side the track. The only other modeled part of the refinery is the storage tanks. As William says, the rest is so huge and complicated as to not be modeled. I simulate that all the cracking towers and pipes are elsewhere. I am just modeling the railroad part. This is sort of like modeling steel mills.
I'm just in the late stages of making up an HO Walther's refinery kit. It is a LOT of fiddly work. Unless you want the work I'd agree with Flash and say model the tanks and loading only, and maybe have a photo backdrop to show the actual refinery in the distance. (I'm actually using the kit, slightly bashed, as the coke gas recovery plant on a steel mill model. If I'd known before what this kit involved ... )
You asked for good ideas. How about a bad idea. I would use two or three Walthers kits, but NOT the entire kits side by side. Rather a row of pipe stills together and a row of fractionating towers. Add two or three differen size fractionating towers. Say, make some from the metal tubes that $2 cigars come in. Are you against the background. Several modeled refinery thingies against a bunch on the background would work well. So would a mirror if there is a way to hide the edges. Especially great if you have gobs of little lights on your refinery towers. Tank farms take up lots of space, especially if you build containment dikes around them, which is important for bulk liquids. The dikes have ladders or stairs over them, and pipes hither and yonder up and over the dikes.(Don't need containment dikes for gas vessels, of course.) It is more interesting if part of the refinery complex is on one side of the tracks and part on the other sides with pipe bridges over the tracks. Just a few wild and crazy ideas. Kenneth L. Anthony, Corpus Christi TX
Monroe Stewart, oil refinery guy and MMR, built a refinery and then took a picture of it. He replicated the picture on the backdrop 4-5 times to make it look like there were several towers and facilities. It made the refinery appear to be huge.
