Recently an old railroad tank car was unearthed during construction of a new elementary school in Berwick, PA. The top of the tank cars expansion dome was only inches from the underside of a side walk that the works had removed. The site of the new school use to be an old textile mill and the tank car was buried sometime in the 1940s and was used as a fuel oil tank for the mill, with pipe line running from it to the mill. When the mill installed a new fuel oil tank the old railroad tank car was left in place and forgotten about until it’s discovery recently. Last I had heard was they will be digging it up and removing it from the site.

Can anyone tell what kind of tank car it is by the pictures below? Was it an AC&F design? I'll post more info as I find out more.

Well, considering that tank-car builder Berwick Forge & Foundry was also in Berwick, I would suggest the odds are great that it's one of their former tanks.

And please, let's quash the "somebody should SAVE this!" talk, even if by some miracle it was buried with trucks. The nearest rail museum already has an ACF tankcar.

Are we the Railway Scrapping News?

This is perfect education for the new school for what was there. They could yank it out, put it on blocks/track, have the kiddies have some project fun cleaning it up and painting it, and have a sign telling this tank car story.

I'll be honest... I've heard of weirder things being buried. Years ago, when my father was getting started in the heating field he was working for a company called Sahagian's (I think that's how you spell it...). He was helping the mechanics work on the old trucks, yada yada... He learned how to drive one of the trucks working there on some of the spares they kept in the yard. One day he shows up at work and the spares are gone. My grandfather pointed him out back to a freshly dug hole, and there were the three trucks just sitting there. The owner buried them right on the back of his property instead of sending them to scrap and retaining the tanks for other trucks. To my knowledge they're still there. Sahagian's got bought by Arrow Gas (Arrow is now part of the Surburban family) some time after my father went to Peterson Oil.

I sure hope no one ever wants to dig up and restore the two tankcar tanks that IRM has hiding in the bushes, since they have been serving as septic tanks for the last forty some years. Some things are best left buried.

A plastic molder I worked with a number of years ago bought a new (to them) building and was surprised to find two tankcar tanks buried under the parking lot, still full of fuel oil. The tanks were apparently close to full when the heating plant was changed over to natural gas years before, and no one had ever thought to sell the oil, or maybe they thought they should keep it as a back-up... whatever. Since I was known as the "train guy", they asked me if I could supply drawings so they had some idea what they were dealing with, and I was happy to oblige by copying some tank drawings out of a WWI era Car Builder's Cyclopedia as a representation of typical construction.

What really surprised me was that the EPA was never involved. They told me their attorney advised them that since the tanks were full, that meant they hadn't leaked, therefore there was no environmental issue, so no need to call the EPA. They pumped the oil out, sold it to an oil scrapper, filled the tanks with sand, and covered them over again. Somehow, I don't think that scenario would fly today.

Supposedly it was installed back around 1946 when the mill was built. One of the stories I've heard is that being at the end of WW2 there was not enough martials to build a proper new tank for the mill, it was cheaper and easier to just repurpose an old railroad tank car instead. The tank still has some sludge in it and being that a school is being built on the site the decision was made to have the car dug up and removed rather than try to pump out the remain material inside, clean it and fill it.