Victorville Layout Design Goals and Room Lighting

This time I’m going to list the main design goals for my layout, and after that I’ll show you the progress on installing room lighting before the layout is built.

Defining My Layout Design Goals

Here are the main design goals that I’m trying to meet, with the most important ones first:

1. Represent the trackage and scenery of Victorville and its cement plant (circa 1950) as accurately as possible, from the Lower Narrows at one end of town to the Upper Narrows at the other end.

2. Provide a double-track loop through Victorville for running two trains continuously (one eastbound, one westbound) whenever I feel like it, which may be often.  I love watching two moving trains meet on double track, and I’m much more into the railfan’s view of model railroading than the operator’s view.

3. Provide as much staging as possible, for storing a lifetime's worth of trains and locomotives on the tracks, so they can be sent through the Victorville scene in either direction.  Additional rolling stock could be stored under the layout in boxes or cassettes of various kinds.  Some of my trains are for display running only, such as passenger trains from the SP, WP, MILW, and NYC, and some are special trains, like a circus train, a carnival train, a troop train, a military vehicles train, a hospital train, a convention train, and so forth, but I’d like them sitting out on staging tracks, not hidden away in boxes.

4. Provide for a reverse loop somewhere in staging, so that westbound trains can later become eastbound trains, and vice-versa.  (But my final trackplan can only do this for one direction.)   Also, the reverse loop needs to turn steam helpers around, as if they were being turned at Summit.

5. Provide for walk-around operation by three or four operators.  There could be one running westbound trains, one running eastbound trains (including helpers returning light), one for the local switcher, and one for the branch lines (Mojave Northern and George AFB).  These jobs could be combined when there are only one or two operators.

6. Provide for prototypical operating sessions, with all the operations that occurred in the real Victorville area on a given date: through trains, freights taking sidings, taking water, adding helpers, returning light helpers and turning them, local freights dropping off and picking up cars, and the local switcher working all the industries.

7. If possible, model the two branch line railroads at Victorville -- the Mojave Northern Railroad at the cement plant, and the branch line to George Air Force Base.  Also, provide two staging tracks to represent the nearby Oro Grande cement plant.  If possible, and probably last of all, model the trackage at George AFB, where the cars could be spotted at eight different spurs plus an engine house. 

8. Avoid duckunders and pop-up hatches (I’m only partly meeting this goal), and have all the tracks reachable from the aisles.

9. Use 36” curves and #8 turnouts on the mainlines and passing sidings.  Use #6 turnouts on the spurs.  Use 24” radius or larger curves on the branch lines.  Use 2.25” track spacing on the mainline curves (and so on the straightaways too).  Try to follow Joe Fugate’s standards for trackwork, not the outdated ones from John Armstrong.

10. Provide 30” aisles (and larger where possible), and provide a 36” aisle to the laundry room.  But go down to a couple of 22” aisles for walking partly sideways where needed.

11. Allow for a lower deck for lots of staging, with a large-radius helix (easy grades) to connect it to the upper deck.  Avoid grades on the upper and lower decks.  (I’ve abandoned the helix idea for the time being.  Instead, I’m adding an eight-track staging yard on the upper deck, and I’ll be using the separate lower deck for storing and displaying extra trains.)

12. Allow for a dispatcher who coordinates the actions of all the trains and hands out train orders to the trains that will come through town.

So, those are the goals I’m working toward. 

As for physical progress, the first step was to remodel the basement, especially to take out an unwanted wall and part of a wall of cabinets between the staging area and the main basement area.  We hired our favorite handyman to do that, and it took a long time (with breaks), but the work is almost complete now.

The next step was to install a row of LED shop lights all around the future edges of the layout, above the aisles.  I planned the exact locations of the 23 shop lights, each 48” long, and climbed up to mark the locations for the 46 hooks in the finished ceiling.  The lights had to be low enough to pass under the beam that supports the house, which is 6'11" from the floor.  I was doing this during May, 2020, as seen here:

Then our handyman, Patrick from Ireland, installed all the shop lights in late May, as seen here:

I’m happy with the final results, which you can see in several views of the basement here.  This first view looks across the future location of the main peninsula, with the two posts that hold up the house in the right distance, and the laundry room doors on the left:

This second view shows the two walls that have bookcases full of railroad books (and a full-size track plan section being laid out on the floor):

This final view is looking into the future staging room, from where a dividing wall used to stand:

Overall Victorville Layout Track Plans

It's time for another blog entry.  I send frequent updates to a small circle of local friends and to a group of other Victorville modelers and fans, but I feel that this blog should be a little more formal than those e-mails. 

Recent progress has been to get all 23 LED shop lights mounted above the future aisles of the layout, and to begin cutting out very large sheets of paper (one for each of the 14 main benchwork sections) for drawing the full-size HO track plans and benchwork girders and joists on them, in preparation for cutting and building the benchwork.

I haven't yet described for you my main layout design goals, nor the signature scenes in postwar Victorville that I plan to model, but this time I want to jump ahead and show you what the final layout is supposed to look like.  I'm going to use five nice drawings that my architect friend in Wisconsin, Jim Coady, has created for me using his SketchUp wizardry.

He took my large 1" = 16" scale drawings that I did in pencil and put them into SketchUp and added some benchwork under the upper deck (ignoring the lower deck for now).  Here is a top view of my basement with all the trackwork added in:

You can't see all the track details at this size, but it will do for giving the general shape of the layout and basement. 

The lower half of the image shows the main, scenicked peninsula, which has the long, straight tracks of Victorville on the right side of the curving backdrops, and the wye for turning steam helpers sticking out at lower right.  On the left side of the backdrops is the large cement plant scene.  On the right and left edges of the cement plant you will see two posts that hold up the house, with the post on the right hidden behind the curving backdrop.  (There is nothing in the black hole between the two backdrops.)

The scenes on the peninsula are quite deep and require pop-up scenery hatches on each side of the backdrops in the center of the peninsula for emergency reaching into the far sides of those scenes.

To the left of the cement plant and across the 36" aisle are the doors to a bathroom and a laundry room.  The aisle below the peninsula is not as wide as it looks, as there are bookcases along that wall, and more bookcases along the wall on the right.  The sliding door to the back yard is near the tail of wye (by the way, the wye can fold down when not being used).  There is also a treadmill along the right wall near the wye, so the space is not quite as open as it looks, but there is still quite a bit of aisle space in front of Victorville.

As we move up to the throat of the peninsula, we squeeze through the space between the built-in wall of cabinets in the center of the room and the wall on the right.  This is where the mainlines from Victorville head west through the rocky Upper Narrows, and the mainlines from the cement plant head east through the rocky Lower Narrows of the Mojave River (with the backdrop separating the two scenes).

Then the tracks enter the "staging room," which is the part of the basement above the center cabinets.  As you can see, the mainlines loop around there to form a double-track oval for running trains continuously when wanted.  But the proper way to operate is for the trains to exit the mainlines there and proceed into the 8-track stub-ended staging yard, which you see along the top walls of the staging room.

One last thing to point out is the stairway going upstairs at the left side of the basement, and the door to the garage at the bottom of the stairs.

On the drawing you see two red arrows marked View 1 and View 2.  Let's look at those two views of the layout as seen from the operator perspective.

In View 1 the operator is looking at the cement plant, with one post in front of the plant and the other hidden behind the curving backdrop:

In View 2 the operator is looking at the Victorville scene, with the wye behind him:

Now here are my favorite views of the layout, in 3D from up above:

This first view (above) shows the basement as seen from above the stairway, with the staging room on the left and the cement plant on the right.

This second view (above) shows the basement as seen from above the treadmill corner, with the long Victorville scene front and center.

That's all for now -- I hope you've enjoyed this first tour of my future layout.