From what I've heard, the "Doodlebug" is almost 90 per-cent restored, and plans are underway to lay tracks from Travel Town to the Nearby L.A. Zoo to give tourists a ride between both venues.

My local railroad museum has a vehicle that's kinda/sorta similar; I didn't get a chance to ride it a couple years ago when I visited. Time to go again!

A lot of tractors used 'distillate' -- a combination of gasoline and kerosene, depending on the season. The original distillate was a byproduct of the crude oil fractioning process.

Interesting. I was interested in oil production when I was in high school, and it amazed me what could be made from a hundred gallons of Crude oil. It all started when I was in Jewelry class and we students got to play with a sticky, brownish-yellow substance called "Modeling Wax". Come to find out, the stuff was a by-product of the oil refining process. Kind of humbling to look back and realize I was playing with an industrial by-product, but from what I understand, the stuff ends up in everything from Crayons to Cosmetics.

My Dad spent decades working as a chemical engineer, creating new stuff from petroleum products. His specialty was synthetic rubber; he knew more about his materials than anyone in the world. He was hired in 1946 with a BS; earned an Masters back in the 1970s and his replacement had to have a PhD.

Vaseline is probably the earliest and best known petroleum byproduct.

That yellow modeling wax? Intimately familiar with the stuff! We played with casting lead in a high school art class. My lead Argus C-3 camera model taught me a lot about lost wax and filling large voids with molten metal, but it was such a failure that it went back into the melt pot. I still have the solid-lead monocle I made. The instructor challenged me to come up with something totally useless, and we dreamed it up during a lunch break.

Heh! I couldn't help but be reminded of the trials the sculptor Auguste Rodin went through while casting his monumental work, "The gates of hell" From what I read years ago, the first pouring of the bronze went badly, and some of the figures weren't filled properly, or vented themselves, ruining the piece.

An Argus C-3 camera sculpture, you say? Interesting. That reads like it might have been a nice, little paperweight or conversation piece. It kind of beats the castings I made in high school in silver, (When Silver was like .05 cents a gram.) as I tried to copy those Hopi "Squash Blossom" designs. I kinda wish I had kept my silver now.

Some of my fellow FA associates actually have written stories about a race of magical vulpine-morphs which chat with thick German accents and wear monocles. So I'm certain a solid lead one, although useless to us, I'm certain it'd make a dandy "Conversation ender" on a sturdy length of chain.

The mistake I made with the C-3 was it was that the camera is essentially a brick with a lens on the front. I have half-a-dozen of them now; I used one to photograph a historical site when I was a Senior in high school. I made it about 1:2 scale, which meant it was too long and too thick for the plaster mold to fill properly before the lead started cooling. Teachable moment... If I'd kept it 1:3 or under, it probably would have worked fine, but we started running out of semester.