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It depends on the location of the refinery and its product mix.  Most of what is produced by refineries is transportation fuel -- diesel fuel and gasoline -- which has a final destination, for the most part, of a service station or truck stop.  Thus refineries ship most of their product via pipeline to distribution terminals for trucking to final destination, and truck to local customers.  Some diesel fuel and gasoline moves by rail to distant distribution terminals that are not pipeline served.  As example, most of the Western Slope of Colorado and Eastern Utah is not reached by pipeline.  The Conoco and Total refineries in Denver ship 40-70 cars daily of diesel fuel and gasoline to two distribution terminals in Grand Junction, from where final transportation is by truck.  But some fuel also comes into this market by truck from the BP, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, and Flying J refineries in North Salt Lake City, the Sinclair refinery in Sinclair, Wyoming, and the independent refinery at Roosevelt, Utah.  Many refineries also produce LPG, most of which moves by rail to distribution terminals.  Other product streams that move mostly by rail include petroleum coke (moving in covered hoppers).  Petrochemical feed stocks ideally move by pipeline to an adjacent petrochemical plant, but many refineries that are specialized for producing feed stocks move them by tankcar to a variety of destinations.  KCS, for instance, moves about 100 cars a day between refineries and petrochem plants in Beaumont, Texas, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  Refineries producing petrochem feed stocks are generally located in the Gulf Coast, upper Midwest, and New Jersey, where there are industrial consumers.  Western and northern refineries haven't got any customers for petrochemicals for the most part, except for some plastics precursors on the West Coast. In broad terms, if a tankcar-carried commodity moves less than 200 miles, it moves by truck, and if the customer is more than 1,000 miles away it doesn't move at all; the customer finds a closer source. With your situation you could model an LPG loading track, a petrochem feedstock loading track, and two diesel fuel/gasoline loading tracks.  The storage tracks would ideally on the prototype be serial with the loading tracks (not parallel) to reduce the amount of switching time. S. Hadid
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