The Imperial Oil Dealer was located on Highway 68 just before the swing bridge. From the research I have found so far, it was slightly elevated about 12 feet from the highway and has 6 tanks, a larger storage building and a few smaller buildings probably to house transfer equipment. The facility is mentioned as being rail served as far back as the 1930’s and possibly even earlier. This is an important location on the first module of the model railroad because it sits in the foreground.
Unfortunately I have limited options for quality photos of the buildings and storage tanks from the time period I am modelling. The images I do have are either the wrong date or significantly cropped.
The above images span over approximately 20 years but it gives me a good guide to work from. I can see the building has been repainted and while most people will recognize the 1976 colours, I’m going to go with what I see in the postcard and if more information comes along I’ll adjust my plans.
I’m bound to get details wrong and until better photos surface I’m OK with that. I’m not sure if this postcard was hand coloured from black and white. I don’t know what kind of sheathing the storage building had. I don’t know the type of doors, number of windows. I only have a rough idea of the building and tank dimensions.
I am building a modular model railroad that fits in my available space and this has affected the design of this module. The module joints affect where switches can be placed, ideally this spur would be slightly longer and closer to the facia. I also chose early on to include a little bit of highway 68, limiting the overall length of the Imperial Oil spur. The highway is not useful to operate the model railway but its an important landmark to orientate anyone who knows the area. The tracks are elevated about 10 scale feet at the imperial oil facility, the highway limits the length of level track at the Imperial Oil spur. I have to make some concessions to have a reasonable change in grade and a smooth operating model railroad that looks reasonably to scale.
For this model I used tanks from two McGraw Oil Company kits from Walthers, the spill surround is basswood and and the buildings are Evergreen various styreen sheets with windows and doors from tichy and other leftover bits and pieces. The details and colours on the two buildings are my best guess from what I can see in the postcard image. Where I couldn’t see details I tried to build something that would make sense for the location and looks to scale.
I painted the buildings with Vallejo acrylics, gloss clear coated and weathered with oils, then added a dull clear coat and applied powders and oil pastels. The buildings are just about finished but there are still quite a lot of scenery to add as well as a number of smaller details but at this point I have something that while compressed will work.
