Walthers makes a little horsehead walking beam oil pump and TrainCat make a 95' oil derrick... which I have both of these kits. I'm not very knowledgeable about the location of these structures relative to one another... in fact... I'm not even sure if they would necessarily be found near each other. If there is only one derrick... would there usually be one oil pump... or might there be more than one pump near the derrick? Is there a standard layout for the location of these structures in an oil field? I've seen some photos of the oil pump lying around nowhere near a derrick... so... is that realistic? Maybe I'm not thinking too straight on this subject... perhaps is the derrick the precursor to an oil pump... or is the oil pump a complimentary piece of equipment to the derrick. Inquiring future N scale oil tycoons want to know...
the derrick was usually used to drill the oil well. Pumps or Pump Jacks are used to pump the oil out. most derricks have been replaced by mobile drilling rigs. Sometimes they would leave the derrick over the pump jack. So you could in fact have these two side by side or in the same area, or even have the derrick over the pump jack. Most pump jacks are out by themselves though or fenced in when located in the city or residential areas here's a mobile drilling rig
You have two version of the same thing. The drilling rig was used to drill the well, once a good well is found, the drilling rig was taken down and moved to another spot. the pump was used to pull heavy oil out of the ground once it stopped flowing on its own or if it didn't flow on its own. so yes you could have both next to each other. depends on the time frame your modeling. also the drilling rig is more then just the derrick, I seen the model of the TrainCat derrick, it look nice, but it needs a few more items to go with it on a working site. at a time in the past they left the derrick up after the well was drilled, but if you didn't have a good well you could not afford another derrick so you moved it to the next place to look for oil.
Thanks AtomicVette & Jolly. I think the mobile version is the modern post 1970's stuff which is ahead of my timeframe. Jolly is the TrainCat derrick something we would have found in the 1950's to 1960's?
Acording to the TrainCat site: http://traincat2.com/ "Black Gold was found all over America and the country side was covered with oil derricks and the railroads moved both the crude and the refined products all across the US. Our derrick represents one one the most common derrick that were everywhere oil was found from the turn of the century to today. The derrick is 95 feet and is engineered to accommodate a Walthers walking beam pump. The derrick has two grated platforms with railings and joist detail. Two offset ladders are supplied to gain access to the top platform which has an A-Frame hoist and pulley" The dirrick looks like the older type, that was offen left in place. You should Google Oil fields & drilling equipment and see what you can find, I would bet you'll find a lot of info and photos.
Walthers pumps :munhappy: Be aware that the N scale pump sold by Walthers is very big for a walking beam pump. While there are a few that are that large, most are much smaller. I took out two of these pumps that were rigged with the motors because they were extremely noisy. I would only use them as static displays and not operating. Steve E.
My Walther's "horse head" pump is also now a static display. The motor was very noisy and not smooth at all. One more quality control disappointment from Walthers.
I purchased all three of my Walthers’ cricket pumps as kits. I tried building the first one as an operating unit and after many, many, many hours of “Mickey Mouseing”* with them I never got it to run smoothly. The real ones rely on weight and inertia to carry the beam over the TDC and BDC. Our little models don’t have enough mass to accomplish this and the gearing is much to gross to “Swiss Watch” it. The oil rig is a TrainCat product. *Mickey Mousing: A technical term referring to the attempt to assemble in quality that wasn’t originally designed in.
The Walthers pump jack is perfect size for the oil fields up here as our oil is "heavy" and often requires up to 6 of these side by side. But go 100 miles south of here and the field around Cut Bank Mont. has this little baby jack heads. Where do you want to model oil?
I just want to put in my two cents about the pump. I live in southern California and my job takes me all over the place within a 200 mile radius. I see horse head pumps all over the place, sometimes by themselves or in small groups of 3 or 4 and I have never seen a rig nearby. I’ve seen single ones in corner of somebody’s back yard, in the middle of connecting freeways, and on sides of hills. There is no pattern to where you might find them. I don’t clam to know anything about oil, but I think the tower is only used for drilling and then it is removed. The pumps that I see are similar to Walthers photo above, but lower to the ground.
In doing a Google image search on "Oil Well Pumps" very few come back with a derrick in the photo. There was a time when some derricks were never moved from the site after a well came in and a pump jack was installed right under them. I recall seeing this just east of Houston near Baytown along I-10 back in the late 1960s. But these days with portable drill derricks that is a thing of the past.
Wow Russ... Lots of derricks... as far as the eye could see... yet only one pump. I really wasn't expecting that. Looks like all sorts of possible combinations could be resemble a typical oil field. I'm considering a relatively small, about a one square foot, area for a derrick and a couple of pumps. Too bad the pumps aren't very reliable as animated models. Thank-you all for your input.
Depends on the era being modeled. Old time derricks were built on site and sometimes remained when the pump was installed. Modern rigs are moved off site after well is drilled. The size of the pump relates to the depth of the well, small for shallow, big for deep. These pumps are run by timers, so not unusual to see one pump running while other pumps nearby are idle. Look for photos online for the era you’re modeling and copy what you see.
Here’s a link to a 2012 article on a rail spur being developed in response to the Eagle Ford Shale oilfield in Texas under development. https://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Gardendale-no-longer-trivial-3478247.php Lots of photos. Here’s a google earth shot of the facility. I’m skeptical that a small tank battery would have supported a rail sidetrack even back during the transition era.
