Victorville's Lime Rock Plant and Starting the Benchwork

This time we'll continue our Victorville tour with a visit to the Victorville Lime Rock plant, and then we'll cover some recent progress on buying and cutting plywood and designing the benchwork for the staging room.

You may recall that last time we visited the Upper Narrows and its Rainbow Bridge, and adjacent to that area was the large Victorville Lime Rock plant (later Pfizer), which was the biggest industry in town other than the cement plant.  

Here's a 1953 view by Don Sims, shot from the Rainbow Bridge, as a UP passenger train passes the Lime Rock plant westbound:

The building closest to us wasn't completed until 1953.  Here's a street-side view of the 1953 plant from a geology journal:

 

The main building is the tower in the center, and there are two round-roof buildings to the left of it.  There are some silos and a substation to the right, and the 1953 addition is on the far right.  The road slopes up here to cross over the Rainbow bridge, which is off to the right.

Here's an end view of the plant as built in 1947, before the 1953 extension was added:

Note the substation and silos in the foreground and one of the round-roof buildings down the hill on the left.

A fellow Victorville modeler, Wayne Lawson, has made scale drawings of the 1953 plant, as seen in street-side and plan views here:

Trucks brought the limestone to the plant from nearby quarries. The railroad spotted empty covered hoppers, empty boxcars, and boxcars of empty bags. The traffic out was ground-up limestone and clay and talc, and it went out in bulk in covered hoppers and also in bags in boxcars.  They loaded 3 to 6 cars per day. The local switcher would pull out the loads and then push in the empties.

The plant kept growing over the years (and it's still there).  Here's a circa 1960 aerial view, showing the Rainbow Bridge in the background:

Here is the part of my track plan where the Lime Rock plant will go:

I have the 24" of length needed for the 1947 version of the plant, but not the 30" needed for the 1953 plant, so I plan to model the 1947 version.  The 10" of depth just barely fits into my space.  I haven't yet decided on possible stand-ins for these buildings, if there are any.

Note in the drawing that there is a rarely-used stock pen for the local ranchers, and two old carbodies for the depot workers to live in.  Across the tracks we see part of the Texas Quarries granite mill, so we will visit that spot next time.

Now let's look at some initial progress on the layout.  On Aug. 12 I met my friend Ted Argo at a Lowe's store, and we loaded six sheets of 1/2" plywood onto his Jeep to bring to my house.  Here we are, carrying the plywood into the basement:

The next day I drew the cut lines for staging room sections onto the back sides of the plywood sheets (drawing mirror images of the top views):

On Aug. 14 Ted met me at Lowe's again, and we picked out fourteen 2x4s and ten 1x4s to bring home for the staging room open grid benchwork.  Then we set up two sawhorses on the back patio, connected them with 2x4s, and began cutting out Sections 9, 11, 12, 13, and 14 from four of the plywood sheets.  Here is Ted, hard at work with my circular saw and its new blade:

He's able to follow the pencil lines with no straight-edge guide, but I had trouble doing that.

Aug. 17 was a milestone day, as our handyman, Patrick from Ireland, finally removed all of his tools and supplies from the basement, clearing the way for building the benchwork!  But I still want to get the carpet cleaned and a new carpet section installed in the alcove (where the wall was removed) before we build the benchwork.

I began a series of drawings for how the girders and joists and legs would be located in the staging room, which is where we want to build some benchwork first.  Ted and others gave me some good feedback for improvements, and here are the current Version 4 drawings that I made yesterday, using red pencil to show the boards and legs for the staging room sections.

This is the part with the 8-track staging yard (Sections 12, 13, and 14, from left to right):

And this is the other part, with the big loop in the staging room (Section 9 at the bottom, then clockwise to Sections 10 and 11):

 

We expect these plans to keep on changing as construction begins, maybe later this week.

Victorville's Upper Narrows and Planning Benchwork

I'd like to take you on a tour of the areas I plan to model in and around Victorville, starting this time with the signature scene of the Upper Narrows.  Then I'll do another progress report on my plans for the layout sections and the benchwork.

Probably the most recognizable scene in all of Victorville is the Upper Narrows of the Mojave River, with its landmark Rainbow Bridge.  This is at the compass east (railroad west) end of town, where the double-track mainline leaves town and begins climbing up Cajon Pass toward Summit.  Here's a beautiful view that Chard Walker shot in the late 1940s:

 

Here we see a Union Pacific passenger train coming RR east from Cajon Pass and entering Victorville though the spectacular granite cliffs of the Upper Narrows.  On the left is the Rainbow Bridge, which carried a local highway over the Mojave River and out to Apple Valley.  A deck girder bridge carried the highway over the railroad tracks.

Here's another view by Chard Walker, looking in the opposite direction, as a Santa Fe freight train leaves Victorville and comes westbound through the Upper Narrows, beside the Mojave River:

Behind the bridge you can see the smokestacks of the Southwestern Portland Cement Plant (which we will visit later), and above the last diesel unit you can see a white tower of the nearby Victorville Lime Rock plant (which we will visit next time).

Here's one more spectacular shot by Chard Walker, as a Santa Fe 4-8-4 pulls the westbound Fast Mail upgrade after passing through the cliffs of the Upper Narrows:

 

Here now is the part of my HO scale track plan showing how I hope to model the Upper Narrows and the Rainbow Bridge:

 

From the upper right, the double-track mainline enters the scene from the staging room, curves around between the cliffs of the Upper Narrows, and passes under the girder bridge that leads to the Rainbow Bridge.  The Mojave River runs alongside the tracks and passes under the bridge.  A backdrop at the top separates this scene from the Lower Narrows scene on the other side.  Ignore the straight lines at the upper left, where the track plan was folded to copy it.

The aisle is very narrow here, just 22" wide at the hips and shoulders, but I checked it out with my test module, and I was able to walk through it okay if I turned a little bit sideways.  I might want to round off that sharp benchwork corner a bit, but I want all the space I can get for those tall cliffs.

I have scale drawings of the Rainbow Bridge, which I enlarged to HO scale, and it's 31" long in HO.  I found that the discontinued Atlas Curved Chord Bridge is the right size and shape, but all of its diagonal braces have to be removed, and I plan to use a 2nd kit to extend the rainbow girders down to the riverbank and to widen it to two lanes and to add extra walkways and railings at each end.

Now let's do another progress report.  I completed the full-scale drawings for the final two layout sections and did some mock-ups again.  Here is Section 6, which has the tracks that enter the cement plant:

 

In the upper right we see the cement plant again (which was Section 5), and in the foreground are all the curves leading into all the spur tracks of the plant.  The three red cans represent the cement plant's oil tanks, with the oil spur just to the right of them.  The small orange box off to the right is the scale house.  As I laid out all these tracks, I found that I needed to slide the turnouts a bit to the left (into Section 7) to get more space for the curves to go where they should.  The double-track mainline is in the foreground.

Here is Section 7, which is the throat into the cement plant:

 

In the foreground there is a mainline crossover leading to the spur to George AFB, which curves around behind the Victorville Switching Station (where the Atlas substation kit is sitting, but which will be two of the Walthers substations combined).   On the far right, coming from the Mojave Northern side of the cement plant, is a siding for storing M.N. rock cars between runs to the quarry (which is in staging).  I had to extend this siding around the curve, as it was too short on my smaller drawing.

In the distance the mainline curves to the left and enters a pair of through girder bridges in the Lower Narrows (which we've seen in a previous blog entry).  The backdrop here separates this scene from the Upper Narrows and Victorville on the other side.

Once all the full-size track drawings were done, I turned my attention to making drawings for how I will cut the sections from 4x8 sheets of plywood.  I needed 13 sheets of plywood to cover the 14 sections of the layout, with quite a bit of wasted plywood on some sheets.

Here are two example pages of plywood-cutting diagrams.  In this first one, we see Sections 3, 3A, 4, and 4A on two sheets of plywood (Section 3 has the wye, and 3A is the fold-down tail of the wye):

And here are three cutting diagrams for Sections 11, 12, 13, 13A, and 14 on three sheets of plywood:

 

I'm hoping that next week a friend and I can start buying some plywood, transporting it to my house, and cutting some of these shapes on the back patio, using a circular saw, if the weather cooperates.  I'd like to get all the plywood sections cut before the Seattle rainy season arrives in the fall.  Actually, the job is twice as big as it looks, because I need two copies of each section, one for the lower deck and one for the upper deck.

Another task I've begun is to revisit each full-size section track plan to draw the girder and joist and leg locations in dashed lines, so that I'll have all the cutting dimensions for those listed.  Those boards can be cut to size more easily indoors later.

Last time I said that our handyman would have all his tools and things removed from our basement by now, but alas, he needed them for some last-minute jobs, so we haven't been able to work on cleaning the basement carpet yet.  Stay tuned.