Carpinteria's Standard Oil Facility

This is a report on another of the structures I built at the Ventura County Fair this year.

One of the premises of my layout is to include many of the industries along the right of way that were serviced by the Southern Pacific. This includes industries that were long gone by the 1994 era that I am currently modeling and even the 1964 era that I hope to migrate to some day. The Standard Oil of California facility in Carpinteria is one such example.

I enjoy doing historical research. One place I look along the route is at Sanborn maps. Sanborn was an insurance underwriter and developed the maps to document structures and fire fighting equipment in order to establish levels of risk for the various buildings to be insured. They did not insure railroad tracks, so they are not great for exact locations, but it does give some idea. Here are two of the Sanborn maps for Carpinteria dated December 1929, showing the depot, water tanks, and section house on one and the Standard Oil facility, two lemon packing houses, a walnut packing house and the SP Milling facility on the other.

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I am a member of the Carpinteria Valley Historical Society (http://www.carpinteriahistoricalmuseum.org/ ) so I contacted the museum curator to see if he knew of any photos of the Standard Oil facility. I got an interesting response: "Bruce. I did not even know about the Standard Oil facility until you showed me the Sanborn map!" We talked a bit more and have an informal future date to look at some photos of nearby structures to see if it happens to be in the background. There is a 1920's era aerial photo that I looked at and upon some extreme close up I think I can see the facility and possibly a rail car on the spur. Here is the photo with the depot (SP Standard 17, constructed in 1887) to the left. Just below it to the right are the two water tanks and the section house. On the right side of the photo is the Standard Oil facility including a warehouse building and to the right a vertical storage tank. The railroad tracks run diagonally from the lower left to the upper right of the photo.

While I currently do not have a better photo of the Carpinteria facility, I have seen several other buildings that were at one time Standard Oil wholesale fuel distributors including one in Santa Barbara which I may also model later. They were constructed using corrugated steel sheathing. The Grandt Line (http://www.grandtline.com/) Raised Platform Warehouse kit #5908 is ideal for the structure.

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Grandt Line also has a companion kit ( Midwest Petroleum Distributors kit #5907) that has a vertical storage tank.

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The warehouse building is 4 3/4" by 6 1/4". Unfortunately, the space I have on my layout is only 3" between the track and the fascia. So I cut the kit up and shortened it to the 3". It was an easy kitbash. When it came time to paint it I decided to try a technique I had read about using rubber cement to simulate peeling paint. So I painted some rubber cement on a few of the walls, then painted the walls with white acrylic paint from the craft store. After the paint dried, I used a pencil eraser and rubbed where I had applied the rubber cement. The paint peeled right off and it looks good.

For the roof, I went to Bing Maps and using their Birds Eye view, looked at the Union Oil Co. facility in Santa Barbara at Salsipuedes and Guitierrez streets. It is also a similar corrugated building with a porch like the Grandt Line kit. Here is a photo from the southeast showing where the track went in blue. Also notice the porch and the vertical storage tanks to the right.

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Here is a photo of the front of the finished kitbashed model.

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Here are two Photoshoped photos of the sturcture place on the layout.

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As you might notice the clearance is very tight and the structure extends past the fascia. I will be adding 1/2" to the layout to accomodate and bulge the fascia out slightly so as to maintain a smooth surfact along the aisle. I will probably add a piece of plexiglass at this point to protect the two or three structures that are near the edge.

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Stay tuned for the next Ventura County Fair installment on the Miramar Hotel.