Can you spare a tanker?


M

Myowngod

Pennsy Tuscan Red Blood
I was surfing and found this photo from the late 1800's.

ExplorePAHistory-a0b8a4-a_349.jpg


This is the LINK .

I think I need to build up my fleet of tankers to a few hundred or so... that John D. Rockefeller sure had a couple bucks in his pocket. Do you see that lone switcher in the middle-left of the shot. He's got his days work ahead of him.:eek:
 
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I can't imagine the dispatching requirements.

Dispatcher to engineer: "Okay Joe, in the middle of the yard car #2252448 has to be moved to the outside main for the local. Problem is, you have 600 cars to move to reach 2252448, but when 2252448 is moved, you've gotta split up those 600 cars to the appropriate tracks on the waybills here. Have a good one!"

Engineer: "oh sh.t. Yeah. Thanks bud. I quit."
 
There weren't many aerial photos from the late 1800's since the airplane hadn't been invented yet. :) From the look of the tanks cars, I'd say this is more like the 1920-1930 period. There were so many tanks cars back then because the long distance oil pipelines hadn't yet been perfected and built. After WWII, pipelines started to be laid all across the country and the railroads lost a major source of traffic. This why almost all the tank cars you see today carry specialty chemicals that aren't transported by pipeline.
 
That is an awesome shot!!! I'd love to see on of the off-loading facilities from back in those days.
 
UP2CSX said:
There weren't many aerial photos from the late 1800's since the airplane hadn't been invented yet. :)
Click to expand...

It could've been a hot air balloon.:eek:

I was just going off the caption of the web link. But what you said makes sense. My thinking cap was off at the time.
 
It could have been a hot air ballon Ron . They used them in the Civil War for observation also .And boy that is one awesome tanker fleet,
 
I'm thinking it's after 1900 for sure. The switcher tender has a coal pile, not wood (though I don't really know when the RRs converted mainly to coal).

The tankers look to be at least in the teens, if not later.

Kennedy
 
There would have been clerks that kept track lists to know where each and every car was located. It's labor intensive and time consuming but it is accurate. I'm an engineer for a class 1 railroad and there is one yard that we used to have a clerk that kept up with every car in the yard. Then, somebody decided that we could save money by getting rid of the clerk. So now, every time we go to work the conductor has to walk every track in the yard to find the cars we'll need that day, and then we switch them out. So for at least the first hour of every shift, instead of switching and delivering cars like a conductor is supposed to be doing, I sit around while he walks around. But, we're saving money....
 
mikeingeorgia said:
There would have been clerks that kept track lists to know where each and every car was located. It's labor intensive and time consuming but it is accurate. I'm an engineer for a class 1 railroad and there is one yard that we used to have a clerk that kept up with every car in the yard. Then, somebody decided that we could save money by getting rid of the clerk. So now, every time we go to work the conductor has to walk every track in the yard to find the cars we'll need that day, and then we switch them out. So for at least the first hour of every shift, instead of switching and delivering cars like a conductor is supposed to be doing, I sit around while he walks around. But, we're saving money....
Click to expand...

That cost-saving strategy sounds like government thinking my friend. :)

Mark
 
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