Certainly the tank car has all the attributes of car from the teens with
high walkway,heavy full underframe and beefed up end sills. The four domes
indicate that when built it was a four compartment car designed to be able to
carry four different commodities at one time. There were bulkheads between the
compartments. These types of compartments designs were popular well into the 40s
for use in the distribution of bulk refined oil products. The pipes off the
manyway domes are not for filling. They contained safety valves/safety vents to
allow excess pressure to be controlled and released.
Perfect for those small town bulk distributors that only needed a couple
thousand gallons of two to 5 products at a time. When built this car may well
have been a 30 or 40 tonner or thereabouts. Hopefully it ended up at a museum
somewhere.
I would venture that at the time of the photo the bulkheads had been
pierced or removed so the car could be loaded/unloaded from one connection.
While I worked at UTLX I donated two or three of the last compartments cars
to musuems when their time to retire came around.
Leo Phillipp