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.