Along the Stewart Southern (2015), Part 2

This is a “reprint” of a series I posted back in August 2015.

In my last post I had traveled along the Stewart Southern Railway in the summer of 2015 from Regina, SK to just before Stoughton, SK. In this post I’ll talk about the oil transloading facility just outside Stoughton.

Just northwest of Stoughton is the Crescent Point Energy Corp. transloader site. This is where crude oil from nearby Bakken oil wells is transloaded into the tank cars for shipment. There are two long tracks adjacent to the Stewart Southern main line that can each hold a long string of tank cars.

You can see two separate tank car strings plus a 3-unit set of Stewart Southern locomotives.

Here’s my teaser photo from the last post showing the three locos:

The Stewart Southern has five of these locomotives, three visible in the foreground and two more visible in the background. Note the grain elevator in the distance.

There was no activity so I carried on to take photos from a vantage point with better light.

Here are the two locos at the other end of the facility.

A view from the southern end of the facility… this would make a good model train industry, or a Layout Design Element as Tony Koester would say.

A little closer look, showing a couple of the mobile gantry devices used to transload oil into the tank cars. All photos taken from public roads, of course, with a good telephoto lens.

I don’t know the entire loading process but here’s a glimpse.

Note the pipeline running the length of the train. It looks like there is a tap at each tank car position where the gantries are positioned to load the tank car.

Here’s a view of the other side.

It looks a bit like this.

I have no idea how the oil gets to this facility. I assume there is some kind of underground pipeline system, as there didn’t seem to be a lot of tank storage on site.

Before we continue on to Stoughton and its two elevators (and three more Stewart Southern locomotives), I’ll leave you with these pumpjacks across the road from the Crescent Point facility. They are all over the place in southeast Saskatchewan.

On to part 3