I expected small scale live steam locomotives to have their trickier points. After all, you are essentially letting a kettle and stove run around in circles until one of them runs empty. But it turns out that is the easy part. The real hard part is getting oil for the thing.

To keep an engine in good working order you need proper lubrication, steam engines are no different. Unlike other engines, steam engines require something called “Compounded” oil. Compounded oil is oil that has been mixed with tallow (aka animal fat). The tallow allows for emulsification with water, but keeps the oil from being negatively effected. This makes compounded oil effective in environments with water or steam.

The problem with compounded oil is that it is hard to get in small quantities in the United State. Most manufacturers only offer it in large drums. The other option in this country is Wilesco oil. This is only available on two websites that I could find, one of which is E bay. The other option I have found is shopanatomical.com. This is primarily a medical science website, but they happen to have some odds and ends for steam engines.

This is where this blog has fallen by the wayside a bit. I was going to do a segment about how ordering internationally comes out a bit cheaper than ordering from a US option, until I realized my mistake. While redoing the math for this blog I realized that I misread the quantity of the Wilesco oil as 50ml rather than 5 oz. To keep this brief, Shop Anatomical does have the best deal for small orders of compounded oil. However, they only have one option.

Shop Anatomical only has one option for oil, and I am not entirely sure about it. The Wilesco oil seems to be a general use oil for small scale live steam engines. I cannot find specifics on the weight of the oil, but 460 weight seems to be a safe bet since that is relatively common. It should be fine for most small scale uses, but this is still worth noting.

In the United States there are only a few options for getting steam oil, but there are options elsewhere. dreamsteam.co.uk is a solid place for getting live steam locomotives and parts internationally. Even with not being as good of a deal because of shipping, they are still a viable option. They offer larger bottles of oil and have multiple weights available. You know exactly what weight and quantity of oil you are looking from the beginning on this website. There is no guessing like with the Wilesco offering. There are plenty of other international websites, but there are few that will ship to the United States.

Getting compounded steam oil can be a massive pain at first, but there are options out there. Luckily that is the hardest thing to find with small scale live steam. Other important consumables like fuel can by much easier to come by. But that is a blog for another time.

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