Model Trains and Things

Fuel tankers have always been of interest to me and last week Brad Peadon published an interesting recent photo of a couple of refurbished tankers here. That prompted me to dig through my collection of fuel tankers to see what I had to show you.

In New South Wales in later years the government railways coded all their fuel tankers ast NTAF and that code covered quite a wide variety of tankers. The first one I want to show you is this shorty that I photographed in Orange sometime in the early to mid 90’s.

Back in those days there was a small fuel depot adjacent to where Franklin Road crosses the line leading down to the station and a siding ran up a short incline to service that depot.

The next two photos were taken in Bathurst circa 1980. Yes, that’s a 4 wheel tanker and I was quite surprised to find it sitting in the Esso depot’s siding late one afternoon when I went down to fuel the car (back in those days if you had an account at the depot you had a key to the bowsers and booked up fuel on an honour system).

Seeing a tanker sitting in the siding was nothing new but I’d never seen a 4-wheel tanker there before … or after this one occurrence.

While I’m still back in Bathurst here are four more photos I took there. The first three were all on an up train that rolled into Bathurst late one afternoon around 1986-87. In order of appearance we’ve got a three dome tanker, a two dome tanker and a longer tanker that has no domes.

The rust pattern on the shed behind the train is also interesting.

The last photo from Bathurst shows a much longer tanker that I spotted sitting in the storage sidings behind the down platform in the mid 1980s.

The last photo was taken in Lithgow. This short tanker was sitting in the up yard sometime between January 1977 and March 1978.