The last link in the transportation of oil is the distribution of refined products to the consumer. Here again the idea of handling in bulk has been adopted quite generally both in this country and abroad. The tank car on the railroads, the chief carrier of crude oil forty years ago, is now devoted almost entirely to the shipment of the refined products, an up-to-date cylinder tank having a ca pacity of 6,000 to 8,000 gallons. The same econo mies of handling apply to the tank car as to the tank steamer, a modern "loading rack" making it possible to fill a train of twenty cars in an hour. This rack consists merely of a pipe line from the storage tanks laid alongside the railroad tracks, with vertical branches rising up at intervals equal to the length of a tank car. Each branch pipe has its own valve and an adjustable pipe long enough to reach the manhole of the car as it stands on the track. In this way one car or a score of cars can be loaded by pumping directly from the tanks where the refined oil has been stored.
In tank cars, and by tank vessels in the case of seaboard cities, the oil is carried from the main re fineries at New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Whiting, etc., to distributing points, scattered throughout the country. Tank wagons, carrying from 250 to 1,000 gallons, form the connecting links between the tank station and the retail dealer or the consumer. This wagon delivery of illumi nating oils has been so generally adopted of late years in this country that practically every town having 2,000 inhabitants is now included in the system.
The plan of bulk delivery direct to the consumer has been extended enormously by American opera tors in recent years, until now their oil sold far away in the plains of India, or the interior of China may never have been in a package at any stage of its journey since leaving the oil well.
Thousands of native boats of all sizes and descrip tions carry oil in bulk or in cases to the headwaters of every important river in the Orient. Native hawkers pushing their small tanks far into the in terior spread the limits of bulk shipment almost to the very doors of the great deserts of Central Asia. Tank stations and central distributing points for bulk oil now dot these countries of the far east, and appear as startling reminders of the tremendous extension of modern western ideas and methods.
The "case oil" trade is an important special phase of the distributing system. In many ways it forms the most picturesque side of the whole in dustry, and most strikingly illustrates the extent to which the oil trade has surmounted every ob stacle. Shipments of illuminating oil for many Oriental districts, for Africa, Latin America, in fact, for any region where local transportation facilities are not good, are usually made in the tin cans or cases holding from two to five gallons each. Oil in this form can be carried readily by coolie porters, or on pack animals, under conditions where any other form of shipment is impossible, and yet where important markets exist. In the rugged parts of the West Indies, Central and South America, the patient Spanish burro takes case oil to the interior villages, plantations and mines. Donkey trains and caravans of camels re ceiving oil at the seacoast or along the Nile supply the desert dwellers of Egypt and Northern Africa. Even in the wildest parts of the Sahara or the Sou dan the explorer finds the inevitable tin case which once held American oil, the last outlying link in a wonderfully perfect and elaborate system.