One of the first means of transporting the new oil from the Leduc fields to the Edmonton refinery and then on to refineries and markets in eastern Canada was the railway tank car, an imitation of the grain delivery system. Like grain, oil was stored in large holding tanks at Thunder Bay and Vancouver and then transferred to oil tankers which carried it to refineries in central Canada or the northwestern coast of the United States.
The larger the tank car, the lower the transportation costs; but the cost of rail transport by steam driven engines of the type seen here was at least three or four times that of a large (45-60 centimetres diameter) pipeline. Comparative costing indicated, for example, that to ship Alberta crude to Sarnia refineries would cost four dollars per barrel by rail, whereas it would cost fifty-five cents per barrel by pipeline to Lake Superior, and twenty-five cents per barrel by lake tanker to Sarnia. Given these hard economic facts, the uncertainties posed by labour strikes on the railways and the competition for trackage with grain and other commodities, it is not difficult to see why the oil tanker car was only a temporary means of transport.
Courtesy: Provincial Archives of Alberta, H. Pollard Collection (P 1444)
