Victorville's Downtown, and Adding Tabletops to Staging Loop Sections

This time we'll do a tour of Victorville's downtown area in the Route 66 glory days, and then we'll look at some progress in adding plywood tabletops to the lower deck staging loop sections.

Resuming our tour of the Victorville scenes on my future layout, I want to visit some scenes that don't quite fit into my layout, even though I spent years studying them in great detail.  I'm referring to downtown Victorville in the glory years of Route 66, when all the travelers to and from Cajon Pass stopped in town for food, gas, motels, and sometimes car repairs.

Route 66 descended Cajon Pass eastward and entered town on 7th Street.  But 7th Street ended down at D Street, so Route 66 made a left turn onto D Street and ran eastward toward Barstow and the Mojave Desert.  There was a busy block on 7th from C Street down to D Street, and then two busy blocks along D Street, between 7th and 5th.

Here's a color postcard view looking down 7th Street in the mid-1950s:

The Santa Fe tracks are straight ahead, with some lumber loads on the lumber spur there, so the highway will turn left when it gets down to D Street.

Here's an earlier view, a little farther down 7th Street, at the C Street corner:
 

Again, the Santa Fe tracks are straight ahead, this time with cement hoppers visible there.  On the right, we can now see the famous Green Spot Cafe at the corner of 7th and C.  This was a favorite stop for locals and tourists alike until it burned down in 1953.

Let's take a closer look at it:

Note the big sign to the related Green Spot Motel, which was a half-block off to the right on C Street.  Here's a photo of the famous old motel (which is still there):

 

Now we'll go another block down to the corner of 7th and D Street, where we can turn left and see the Stewart Hotel and other buildings along D Street (Route 66):

This was the main shopping district in Victorville, with the Stewart Hotel at this end of the block and the Smith Hotel at the far end.  Here's an earlier view of this block:

The Santa Fe depot was across the street, behind the trees along the right edge, which are in Forrest Park.  Sadly, all of the buildings in this block are gone now.

Moving down D Street to the block between 6th and 5th, this was more of a relaxation block, with a movie theater, various cafes including the famous Red Rooster in the middle of the block, and the Barrel House liquor store at the far end (at 5th and D):

The Red Rooster Cafe is the building with the light blue upper story, and that building is now the California Route 66 Museum.  The other buildings are now gone, except for the Barrel House liquor store at the far end of the block.

This concludes our tour of what is now "Old Town" in Victorville.  These blocks would be off the front edge of my layout, but if I were to model them in a 2nd lifetime, they could go on a removable module that would attach to the front of the layout like this:

As for progress on building my layout, I spent parts of the week of Nov. 16 drawing a trackplan for the lower deck staging loop in 1/16 scale, as seen here:

This plan also includes the helix approach track, which comes in from the right edge and curves to the top of the drawing as it begins its climb up the helix.  It begins as a single track, then splits into two at the top, and later splits into three, then four tracks to form a four-track rectangular helix curving above this area.

Another feature of this area is a cassette loading track, for moving trains and locos on and off the layout using a 36"-long cassette, which would dock in the lower left corner of this drawing (at the dotted line), and its track then curves around the outside of the staging loop until it joins the mainline at the straight section.

I also made a scale drawing of the middle layers of the four-track helix:

The two darker tracks are the main tracks (uphill on the outside, for the easiest grade, and downhill next to that).  The two inner tracks could be used to store and stage extra trains, as needed.  The helix climbs 4" on each of its four turns, from 32" at the lower deck to 48" high on the upper deck.

The reason for making these two new drawings was to check whether these tracks might collide with the legs coming up through the lower deck.  I did find a couple of conflicts and have detached the offending legs, which will be moved to new locations later.

Then it was time to mark the leg locations on the plywood tabletops for each section, so that rectangular notches could be cut along the edges to allow the legs to pass through.   I figured out that I could avoid cutting some notches by moving the legs from inside the frame to outside the frame when they are in the pop-up area inside the staging loop, so I did that.

Today the weather here was dry and sunny for a change, so I was able to set up my sawhorses on the back patio, carry each large, heavy plywood section outside, and use my saber saw to cut the leg notches in the plywood (I cut oversize notches to allow for adjustments).  Then I carried them back inside and laid them in place on top of the lower deck frameworks for Sections 9, 10, and 11, as seen here:

In the distance, there is no tabletop on the small Section 10A, as a new piece of plywood needs to be cut to fit in there exactly.  The two 2x4 legs in the foreground are not attached to the frame, as they were in the way of the future tracks and will be moved to the adjacent Section 8 when the time comes.

I'm working towards getting some roadbed and tracks laid and wired on just these few sections, so I can learn how to do that and then run a few locos and cars back and forth on the staging loop tracks.