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.