I've never written a blog before, so welcome to my brand new blog about the building of an HO scale model railroad based on Victorville, CA, during the postwar decade (1946-1956). Some clinics I've attended recently have recommended a blog as a good way to share and motivate my progress, and perhaps to get some helpful ideas from the readers.
I've been a fan of Cajon Pass, CA, for all of my adult life, as I love the Santa Fe and the Union Pacific railroads, which share the double-track mainline over Cajon Pass, from Victorville on the east side to San Bernardino on the west side. And I love the postwar decade, when the biggest and best steam locos were running alongside beautiful new streamlined diesels. I picked just one town to model, Victorville, which was the helper base on the east side of the pass and has some wonderful, rocky scenery at each end of town (the Upper Narrows and the Lower Narrows of the Mojave River), not to mention a large cement plant as the main industry.
Right now I'm in the final stages of layout design and benchwork design, in hopes of actually starting to build the layout in the coming weeks. It will be a basement-size layout, but it will be mostly in the center of the room, as my wife and I need access to most of the walls, which include bookcases, storage cabinets, a laundry room, a bathroom, and a back door to the patio, as this is a daylight, finished basement.
I'm approaching the age of 75, so it's crazy to be starting on this large layout as my first layout, but I want to attempt it anyway. The original design had staging yards on a lower deck, connected by a multi-track large-radius helix to the upper deck, where the tracks in Victorville would be modeled as accurately as possible.
But friends have convinced me that this would be too complex to build, so I've eliminated the helix for now, in favor of an upper-deck, stub-ended, eight-track staging yard along the walls of my side "staging room." I plan to retain the lower deck as a place to store and display extra trains, and perhaps to have a loop of track for running them down there too.
I will be back in the coming days with drawings and discussions of my track plan and photos of progress on my basement preparations. I have written an article on my layout design for the Layout Design Journal, and that article may appear in the next issue, so I'll let you know if and when that happens.
John Thompson,
Bellevue (Seattle), WA
