Peanut Butter Plant

[FCIN]

Ed, what type of tank car would they use to receive vegetable oil in the late 1970's ?

Justin;
The Atlas 25,500 gal tank cars are perfect. http://www.atlasrr.com/hofreight/ho25500tankcar.htm Although the Atlas model is based on a Trinity design from the late 80's it's almost identical to those that would be seen at the plant in the late 70's and on, built by other rail car manufacturers. The Trinity design is a general service tank car and is quite suitable for representing similar size tank cars from the 70's and early 80's. We used to get tank cars almost exactly like these on the F&C loaded with grain alcohol for the distilleries too. I have a fleet of them for use on my ISL.

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Here's a photo I have of us in route to the Old Grandad Distillery taken in 1981 by a friend as we passed over the 185ft high Bridge No. 3. Note the tank car that contained grain alcohol that would become vodka:    
You could get by with the Athearn 30,000 gal "Ethanol" tank cars, as long as they weren't lettered/stenciled for an ethanol producer. Best bet with any tank car is to go with ones that only carry the reporting marks. Of course for vegetable oil, ADM, Cargill, Bunge logo's on them would be just fine. General service tank cars are rarely, if ever, stenciled to show the commodity being transported - so they could serve multiple uses.

The smaller tank cars designed for transporting corn syrup (17-18,000 gal range) would not be appropriate, but if worse came to worse, you could probably use them, as long as they didn't have any markings on them indicating that they were transporting "Corn Syrup/Sugar".

One other note while I'm thinking about it. You'll need a few Airslide covered hoppers for the inbound shipments of sugar. On average, you'd receive two or three tank cars of vegetable oil a week and one, at most two, cars of sugar in that time frame. I think I noticed at least one Airslide in a photo of your layout, so you have a start there. Any 50ft box car of any road (especially the IPD cars) will be appropriate for the inbound loads of peanuts. Any outbound shipment of peanut butter (one or two a week) would be handled in RBL box cars (insulated - plug door) and could be most any road name too.

I've been toying some with the possibility of having the peanut butter plant as the main industry on my layout, but right now I'm quite pleased with the industries and plan that I have and the amount of switching that is required to operate the layout, so it's just a very slim possibility.