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Old gas stations

Ghostsoldier

Ghostsoldier

Call Me a Cab
Messages
2,408
Location
Starke, Florida, USA
Actually, I remembered that I have some photos of the Shasta in a Facebook album; here it is, in it's somewhat currently faded glory.
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Rob
 
tonyb

tonyb

Messages
10,603
Location
My mother's basement
Shasta trailers are especially desirable. Yours would set many a trailer nut’s heart aflutter.

There are now motel-like accommodations made from collections of vintage travel trailers. In an era of Airbnb and other short-term “vacation rentals,” alternative lodgings such as this are entirely predictable.
 
Ghostsoldier

Ghostsoldier

Call Me a Cab
Messages
2,408
Location
Starke, Florida, USA
dh66 said:
What a beauty, Rob. Nothing there you can't work with, that's for sure, and from how it looks in the pics it ought to be fairly serviceable as-is.

Sent from my SM-G920V using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Thanks, dh... I've just got to convince the wife that it's safe to sleep in; she's a lot like June Carter Cash in Johnny's song, "One piece at a time":

"About that time my wife walked out
And I could see in her eyes that she had her doubts,
But she opened the door and said 'Honey, take me for a spin'".

Rob
 
GHT

GHT

I'll Lock Up
Messages
9,350
Location
New Forest
One of the most iconic designs for fuel stations came from the US in the Art Deco period. The canopy, it looks amazing, has no visible supports, yet offers inclement weather shelter to motorists and staff. In this picture there's no visible way of seeing how fuel is delivered by the tanker, then again, this is a promo picture. We had nothing like it throughout Europe until well into the 1960's and even then the kind of cover we got was like a warehouse roof, purely functional. How I love this scene.
Austin 16 & friends 007.JPG
 
LizzieMaine

LizzieMaine

Bartender
Messages
33,061
Location
Where The Tourists Meet The Sea
The tanker would pull up in the back of the lot, where there'd be iron covers set into the ground like manholes. Flip those up with a jack handle, and you'd find big brass screw caps that opened the pipes leading to the underground tanks. Tanker hoses would clamp onto those pipes, and there you'd go.

It was up to the station owner to keep track of how much product was in the tanks by going out and dunking a long, thin square wooden pole into the pipe, and the number of inches in the tank would translate into the number of gallons remaining. Before dunking the stick, though, you had to swab the end of the pole with a slimy purple cream that would turn bright red in the presence of water. If the pole came up with any red on it, you had a problem.
 
GHT

GHT

I'll Lock Up
Messages
9,350
Location
New Forest
LizzieMaine said:
It was up to the station owner to keep track of how much product was in the tanks by going out and dunking a long, thin square wooden pole into the pipe, and the number of inches in the tank would translate into the number of gallons remaining. Before dunking the stick, though, you had to swab the end of the pole with a slimy purple cream that would turn bright red in the presence of water. If the pole came up with any red on it, you had a problem.
Click to expand...
Water in a sealed fuel tank doesn't seem possible, but I know that it is, the cause is condensation. I was unaware that there was a kind of litmus test to detect the presence of water. A garage owner that I knew back in the late 1960's had told me that they would dip their main fuel tanks and never let the level drop below a certain level. This was to prevent what he called the sediment from being drawn up when pumping the fuel into the customer's cars. I have no idea how they would deal with water in the fuel.

When I was in business with my brother we had a problem with one of our delivery vans, it would run ok then the engine would just die. This was back in the first decade of this century. All the local dealer would do was to plug in the diagnostic cable and slavishly follow the computer's instruction. Luckily we were told of a one man business who was very good at finding the solution to problems like our's.

We were at the point of selling a perfectly good, two year old van, just because of it's poor reliability. At the problem solver's workshop we were told that he had a good idea of what the problem might be, but it would cost us two hundred pounds in labour charges to strip out part of the engine and with no guarantee that it would work. Looking at a five grand loss on the van we went for it. Next day we had a phone call to go and see what had been found.

After the stripping out, one of the components, a glass dome which I think was the fuel filter prior going into the fuel pump, (our van had a diesel engine,) was left upside down on the work bench overnight. At the top of the fuel was a layer of water, about the thickness of a cigarette paper, but the trouble that it had caused. It cost us a further grand to have the entire fuel system, including the main fuel tank, completely cleaned out, after which the van didn't miss a beat. All that was because condensation had been drawn up from the supply tank, but proving that was not only difficult, but just too costly.
 
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