The Cement Plant's Mojave Northern Railroad, and Drawing More Track Lines

This time we'll visit the Mojave Northern Railroad, operated by the Southwestern Portland Cement Plant of Victorville, and then we'll look at some progress and revisions in drawing more track lines on the plywood tabletops.

The far side of the cement plant was where the Mojave Northern Railroad operations were centered.  The job of the railroad was to carry cars loaded with limestone rocks from various quarry locations into the plant, where the rocks were crushed and then used to make cement.  

Here's a great photo from the Orange Empire Railway Museum showing one of the Mojave Northern 0-6-0T steam locos with a string of loaded side-dump rock cars:

Note that each rock car has three bins full of rocks.  Each bin was rotated separately to dump out the rocks.

When the train of rock cars got to the plant, the loco pushed the cars up a wooden trestle to where the rock-dumping tower was located, as seen here:
 

Here's an early view of the end of the trestle, with the rock-dumping tower over the trestle, the rock crusher tower on the left, and the large pile of crushed rocks:

As we saw last time, in later years this open pile was enclosed in a very large building.

Let's go back to the part of the circa 1940 aerial view that shows the trestle and the Mojave Northern shops to the right of it:

We can see a string of loaded rock cars at the far end of the trestle, waiting to enter the rock-dumping tower, and to the right of there is the rock crusher and the open pile of crushed rocks.  At the bottom of the photo is the three-stall engine house, and other shops are behind it.

In 1947 the roster of three 0-6-0T steam locos was joined by two new GE 70-Tonners, numbered 5 and 6.  Here is one of them, numbered 5 and named Leonardt:
 

Here's a later view of both 70-Tonners, as photographed by Richard Steinheimer:

By this time the diesels had been repainted from light gray to dark green.  A bit of the trestle is visible at the far left, the engine house and the distant rock crusher tower are in the center, and the end of rock car number 38 and part of a steam loco are visible in front of the engine house.

Besides the change to diesels for doing most of the work, the cement plant also began using regular hopper cars instead of the old side-dump rock cars.  Here's a photo of a steam loco with a string of hoppers (from the Orange Empire Railway Museum collection):
 

The hoppers were not pushed up the trestle.  Instead, they were spotted at an unloading track built for them beyond the trestle, with a car shaker to help unload the rocks into a underground bin, as seen here:

 Here's the part of my track plan that covers this part of the cement plant:

Near the top, note the ramp to the trestle, and above that is the hopper unloading track.  The two circles at the end of that track are open slurry tanks.  Below them is the rock crusher and the limestone storage building, and to the left are the shops and the engine house (compressed to two stalls). 

The main track of the Mojave Northern leaves the plant at the upper left of this drawing, passes a short siding for storing rock cars, and then crosses a long, low trestle over the Mojave River.  

Beyond there the track is hidden behind a cliff as it sneaks through the Lower Narrows scene to emerge in staging, where it comes to a quarry scene called Dock 5.  In this drawing, the two quarry tracks are in the center, and the curving hidden track is near the right edge.  The track has to climb a grade to get to the quarry, just as the real railroad did:

 

Here's a distant view of a Mojave Northern quarry, with a loco and three rock cars on the left and a large electric shovel on the right:

This concludes our tour of the Mojave Northern Railroad and the cement plant.

In the past two weeks I drew in all the tracks on Section 11, using various poster board templates for curves and angles, as seen here:

I need to widen the benchwork a bit near Section 10A at the bottom of this photo, both for the outside curve and the inside curve.

I laid out all the Atlas turnouts and marked their locations, but some of the throwbars and switch machines interfered with adjacent tracks, so I had to move them a little to resolve the conflicts.

Before I could start to lay any cork roadbed, I discovered some serious problems with the design of the yard throat on Section 9, so I went back to the drawing board to make a lot of changes.  I also found that I have room for an extra three-track stub-ended storage yard near the front edge of Section 9.  Here is the revised plan for this area (somewhat hard to read):

Here's a current photo showing all the turnouts laid out in their proposed locations:

At the bottom of the photo I've added some scrap plywood to work out the track locations leading into future Section 8 there.  Section 9 is on the left, where I plan to use ground throws on the turnouts, as they are close to the aisle.  Section 11 is on the right, where the turnouts are shown with table-top switch machines, as this area will be inside the helix someday and not easily reachable.

I'm hoping that I'm finally ready to lay some roadbed and track in the coming weeks!