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Cincinnati & Lake Erie Freelance Buffer Cars and Marcellus Crude Oil Tanks - Modern Day (2 sheets) HO Scale

Marcellus Oil Backstory

In 2014, Georgia Road purchased the Cincinnati & Lake Erie Railroad to extend its reach into the “rust belt” area of Ohio and Indiana. The CLE was seen as a connection to the Great Lakes region, and to various automotive assembly plants and mixing centers. Along with auto parts, the road hauled aggregate, coal and crude from its connections along Pensylvania and Ohio and the Georgia Road via Paducah, KY, the CLE’s western terminal. The recession of 2008-2009 took its toll on the regional, with automotive, the road’s mainstay, seeing double digit drops in carloadings as plants closed and geared down. The one bright spot was the fracking going on in the Marcellus Shale Field deposits running from Western Pennsylvania toward Canada. With the Obama administration fixed on ending any attempts to build a pipeline to link these new fields, producers and shippers in the Field turned to unit crude trains to move the oil to the Gulf States Region refineries and pipeline terminal locations around Birmingham and Mobile. The advent of the new traffic literally mushrooming overnight took its toll on motive power and track structure that had seen deferred capital maintenance Facing a need to raise capital in a short period, CLE shopped itself out to connecting interchange partners. The fear was that due to the fall out and increasing regulation of crude trains, the CLE’s less than ideal condition would invite an FRA embargo before it could improve. Georgia Road quickly grabbled up the regional as a subsidiary, pumping new and rebuilt power from the Georgia Road fleet to power the new crude traffic. Georgia Road shifted its capital maintenance teams to the railroad immediately, rebuilding the railroads main artery into Louisville, KY and northeastward to Pennsylvania in months. Crude trains now ran the full route from the Marcellus loading points to the pipeline and refineries ion the Gulf side “Chemical Coast” Like BNSF, GARD and CLE decided to used dedicated buffer cars for the service. Several pairs of stored CLE airslide hoppers now obsolete due to the influx of larger Pressuraide cars left them waiting for assignments that would never come. As a result these cars had their piling and valves removed, and a large hatch cut into the car to allow for easy loading and adjustment of sand ballast, now required for all buffer cars used in crude oil service. These cars work in pairs on either end of a train of crude tank cars, used to buffer the flammable tank cars from the locomotive consist. Having one buffer on each end also allowed the set to reverse direction during load-unload cycles with minimal switching.

Marcellus Oil and Gas is a wildcat independent fracking company that purchased its own FRA compliant tank cars for use in its own unit trains over the CLE-GARD routing. These cars carry reporting marks MOGX and have the Marcellus Oil and Gas logo, depicting the growth of the company as both a natural gas and light sweet crude producer.