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.