...did you grow up with? I know a lot of model railroaders have a gas station on their layouts and railroads moved tank cars for all of the refineries. So, I was thinking about the gas stations that used to exist. In Kansas, where I grew up, we had: Vickers (where my parents bought gas) Sinclair Mobil Standard (later Amoco) Texaco D-X (another one I really remember) Conoco Phillips 66 Apco and probably a bunch that I don't remember. How about you? Charlie
Richfield Shell Flying A Mobilgas Husky Gulf Esso Enco Humble Many others I knew and saw, but have forgotten.
Wow... there are a lot of memories... especially of the wacky, futuristic building shapes (like the Vickers station) that popped up in the 50s and 60s. Up here we also had Sunoco, Irving, etc. Remember the lists of gasoline companies published on the backs of road maps?
Phillips 66, Citi, J&L, Shell, Conoco, Mobil, Gulf. I actually did build/ paint a number of N Scale intermountain 8000 gallon tank cars for the fuel companies.
On my previous and current 1950s layouts, I have wanted to represent major oil and gasoline brands merchandised in Texas during the 1950s. CONOCO GULF HUMBLE (Texas subsidiary of Standard Oil/ Esso) MAGNOLIA (Texas subsidiary of Mobil) PHILLIPS 66 SHELL SINCLAIR TEXACO And to have tankcars representing these brands. I was able to buy ready-to-run N tanks cars for Gulf, Shell, Sinclair and Texaco, and I repainted and decalled models for Conoco, Magnolia and Phillips 66. I only missed Humble, due to lack of decals and documentation that cars lettered for Humble actually operated in the 1950s. I took a photo of a tankcar lettered for Humble displayed at Galveston Railroad Museum before Hurricane Ike (don’t know if it’s still there), but couldn’t determine whether it was period-specific. I also run a Warren tankcar for Gulf. According to Business Week magazine for November 19, 1955, Gulf Refining acquired Warren Petroleum in an exchange-of-stock deal, taking Warren’s 4300 car tank fleet.
My last layout had one Phillips 66 bulk oil dealer, Jayco, located in a courthouse square town that was the layout’s main scene. The model was scratchbuilt to copy a Phillips 66 bulk oil dealer in Sealy, Texas. Medium sized towns such as the one I model, a “county seat” town often have several competing brand bulk oil dealers, usually in the same area of town and sometimes sharing spots along the same spur. They receive petroleum by tankcar, and distribute it by tank truck to retail dealers (service stations) within a 30 to 60 mile radius. It is not absolutely necessary to have a branded retail service station modeled in the same town as the bulk oil dealer of the same brand, since the bulk oil is distributed by tank truck over a 30 to 60 mile radius. In my town, I had a Phillips 66 bulk oil dealer, but a Magnolia service station. Magnolia was distributed by tank truck from another dealer in a town somewhere “down the line”. If I have only one bulk oil dealer, how do I justify all the different oil company brand tankcars. I simply run most of them on through trains, rather than on the local that switches my main town scene. Phillips 66 products were delivered to my modeled bulk oil dealer by a local (“peddler”) train from the (unmodeled) refinery at Santa Vaca (my version of Houston.) But through trains from “Lost River” (my version of Beaumont, unmodeled, represented by staging) ran through my modeled scene, carrying brand-name tankcars from Gulf, Magnolia and Texaco, which had refineries at Beaumont in real life. That is a justification for cars going by in through trains. What about the other brands of oil company which do not have refineries at Beaumont. They wouldn’t be shipping their products to Beaumont which already has plenty of locally-produced petroleum, would they? That would be like “shipping coals to Newcastle,” wouldn’t it? However, I found railroad industry spur records which showed that Sinclair and Shell DID have bulk oil dealers in Beaumont-- perhaps to maintain a brand presence in the middle of their competitors’ refining centers.
My family moved around a lot. In the summer of 61 I was a big fan of Sinclair because of their dinosaurs. I had a huge inflatable "Brontosaurus" that was my go-too water toy while staying at my grandmother's cottage on Green Lake in Wisconsin. While we were living in the Philippines for two years prior to that, the brand I remember was Caltex. It was a joint venture between Standard Oil of California and Texaco. It is still used as a brand name by Chevron in Australia and other places in that region. While visiting there last spring this sign brought back memories.
