Victorville's Cement Plant, and Finishing the Staging Loop Benchwork

We're going to leave downtown Victorville behind now and begin a tour of its nearby cement plant.  We'll also look at the final steps in finishing the benchwork for the lower deck staging loop.

A short distance timetable east of Victorville is its very large cement plant, which was named Southwestern Portland Cement (SWPC) until recent decades.  We're going to look at the front of the plant as seen from the highway this time.

Here's an early 1950s view of a westbound Santa Fe freight passing the plant:

Note the sign board on the right, the tall cement storage silos, the bagging building with all the windows, and two lower silos beyond that.

Here's a great view of the entire track side of the plant as it was before expansion in the 1950s:

From right to left, we see the row of large silos with a "headhouse" along the tops of them, then the bagging building, then a lower warehouse partly behind the bagging building (the two lower silos had not been added there yet), and then a long traveling crane structure over the clinker pit.

Clinkers are the marble-size balls that are produced by a cement plant's kilns, and at this plant they were stored outdoors in a very long clinker pit.  

Most clinkers were ground into cement powder to be shipped out in covered hoppers or in cloth bags in boxcars, but some clinkers could be shipped in or out of the plant as is, depending on demand at other cement plants.

There was a spur track over the clinker pit, where open-top cars could be loaded with clinkers, or where they could unload clinkers, using a bucket device on the traveling crane.

Here's a late-1950s view of the plant from the highway (Route 66), when more silos had been added at the far end:

From this view we can also see the original cement silos that were hidden behind the newer silos, and we can see some of the buildings inside the plant. 

Here's one last view of the plant in the late 1950s, looking from the other direction:

The newer silos fill the left half of the photo, with the clinker pit behind them.  The older half of the plant fills the right half of the photo, and that's the part I plan to model.  Note the highway (Route 66) in the foreground and the Santa Fe mainline tracks beside the silos.

Here's the part of my track plan that shows most of the cement plant trackage, which is somewhat compressed from all the tracks that were actually in the plant:

The big four-track curve on the right comes in from the Victorville scene on the other side of the backdrop.  Right beside the mainlines at the bottom of the plan we can see the silos, the packing house, and the two lower silos, and behind that row we can see the original silos, the warehouse, and the clinker pit with its spur track on a ramp.  We'll visit the interior of the plant next time.

Because this scene is so deep, I plan to add a raised platform around the post, so that operators and see and reach into the scene as needed.

Turning now to progress on the layout benchwork, after the notches for the legs had been cut in the plywood tabletops, I removed the plywood to work on the frames one more time.  I bought a belt sander and sanded down any joists that were not perfectly even with the adjacent joists, so the plywood sheets could lie flat on top.  The belt sander worked great, and I posed for this photo:

 

Then I put the tabletops back onto the frames, aligned them as well as I could, clamped them down, and drew pencil lines above the centerlines of all the girders and joists underneath, so I'd know where the screws could go.

I decided to use just screws and no glue to attach the tabletops, and I decided to mark spots for the screws that were about 12" apart (an arbitrary distance, with no guidance found in any books). 

At each screw location I drilled a pilot hole, countersunk it, and drove in a screw to hold the plywood down to the frame.  Section 9 needed 33 screws, Section 11 got 19 screws, Section 10A got 10 screws, and finally (today) Section 10 got 25 screws.  Here's a view of the results, shot from above near Section 11 (look for the screw locations):

So the benchwork for the lower deck staging loop is finally done, and next week I can begin marking the locations for the roadbed and track!