The 5 x 7 inch booklet from which these regulations are taken is 443 pages long. Although there is some overlap with other types of hazardous goods, I have tried to focus on the regulations covering tank cars used for the transportation of flammable liquids. All images in this post are from this booklet, except for the tank car photo.
Early in the age of petroleum, crude oil would have been transported in wooden barrels or circular, covered wooden vats mounted on tank cars. Titusville (1859), Pennsylvania; and Oil Springs (1858) and Petrolia (1866) in Canada were the sites of the first major efforts in North America to commercialize petroleum production.
While these two international rivals sometimes debate which location was technically 'first' ... it was in 1854 at Bibrka (in today's southeast Poland) that Ignacy Łukasiewicz, a Polish polymath, first obtained petroleum in its natural state, distilled it and invented the kerosene lamp.
In 1854 Łukasiewicz said: "This liquid is the future wealth of the country, it's the wellbeing and prosperity of its inhabitants, it's a new source of income for the poor, and a new branch of industry which shall bear plentiful fruit."
The industrializing world was ready for petroleum products which could more cleanly and effectively produce light and lubrication - replacing less satisfactory oil and fat substances derived from animals.
Back then, the lighter fractions of oil (like gasoline) had no practical use. The very first light horseless carriages which burned petroleum in an internal combustion engine were only being invented by Carl Benz as the last spike of the CPR was being driven. After Benz's earliest inventions, practical vehicles which could climb hills or be driven on typical city roads were at least a decade in the future.
Consider, then, that as the first crude oil was being transported in the late 1800s, crudes which were higher in lighter crude fractions (again, like gasoline) constituted a nasty, unprofitable safety hazard for the refinery workers and railroaders who had to handle them. By the time this booklet had been published in 1930 by the Interstate Commerce Commission, hundreds (and more likely thousands) of workers had been killed or suffered debilitating burns through accidents, ignorance and the inadequacies of early tank car design.
 |
| from: GATX, A History of the General American Transportation Company, 1898-1948; Ralph C Epstein; 1948; North River Press. |
