Coast oil can tank train

[Trainzguy2472]

I have head from a few sites that Union Pacific will stop running their coast oil cans.  The GATX Tank Train cars are getting old, and have apparently reached their end of service life.  Also, it seems that there is some opposition against running them on the coast. Will the the oil be hauled by trucks or something?  That would be a bummer and add a zillion more trucks to the road.  Or will the tank train take a different route (I've heard that they might go over Raton pass)?

Can someone please shed some more light on all the rumors?

Thanks,

Matthew

[MidlandMike]

Could it be that the oil production area is depleted to the point that here is no longer a train load?  Also did you mean Cajon Pass?

[YoHo1975]

No, the oil can train was moved to the former SP Coast line. Running from San Ardo to Carson. The Tehachapi operation was shut down right after the SP/UP merger. As I recall, a refinery was built in Bakersfield, so the crude no longer needed to be shipped to the basin. There are plenty of potential replacements for those cars what with the tar sands and bakken oil shipments driving new tank puchases, so I can't imagine car age is the true reason to shut down the train. There's no way trucks could move it effectively. I can't find any news reference to the oil cans shutting down, but I'd wonder if the SLO county denial of the Nipomo crude unloading spur and general sentiment of the region aren't playing a factor. The Nipomo refinery wanted that spur, because the instate fields it gets supplied from were drying up. So it is possible San Ardo is simply becoming played out.

[CShaveRR]

The impending loss of the equipment due to age is plausible.  These aren't just ordinary tank cars--they're TankTrain (TM, R, C, whatever) cars that are connected together by hoses in such a way that the entire train (or an entire portion of the train) can be loaded and unloaded through one valve.  Cars like this haven't been built for 30 years or longer.  I'm not sure anyone has built them since General American exited the carbuilding busines in the 1980s.

The technology is sound, but I'm sure that these days it would require one of two things:  redesign of the TankTrain cocept to provide added protection in the event of a derailment, or total redesign of the terminals to permit car-by-car loading and unloading.

[MidlandMike]

The fact that these cars have not been built for 30 years, would suggest that they had as many problems as they solved.  While it may save time in hooking up many pipe connections, all the oil has to pass thru the single connection to fill a number of cars.  Perhaps they found it faster to have multiple loading racks, and load many cars at once.  They built many loading terminals in Texas and ND in he last 5 years, and it does not seem as if Tank-Train was a consideration.

[ericsp]

YoHo1975

As I recall, a refinery was built in Bakersfield, so the crude no longer needed to be shipped to the basin.

First the oil was piped over the Tehachapis to Mojave where is was loaded in the Oil Cans. About 2000 a pipeline was built over Tejon Pass so the oil travel by pipe for its entire trip.

YoHo1975

There are plenty of potential replacements for those cars what with the tar sands and bakken oil shipments driving new tank puchases, so I can't imagine car age is the true reason to shut down the train.

Cars built to carry Bakken crude are much larger than these cars. You can't load high density liquids in a car designed to carry low density liquids. Cars built to carry oil made from tar sands may be the right size but are there spares?

This was brought up in another forum about a month ago. It was a rumor. Nothing was know for sure.