Revisiting the Lime Rock Plant, and Laying More Cork Roadbed

Last time we revisited the Upper Narrows, so the next stop is to revisit the adjacent Victorville Lime Rock plant.  We'll also see some progress on laying cork roadbed for the staging mainlines and the adjacent five storage tracks.

Let's start the tour with this same great action photo by Don Sims in 1953:

A westbound UP passenger train is passing the Lime Rock plant, as seen from the Rainbow Bridge.

My friend Wayne Lawson has built an N-scale mock-up of part of the plant, as seen here from the street side:

Here is his drawing for the end view of the plant:
 

He tells me that most of these parts will have to scratchbuilt, except for some of the silos.

Here's a trackside view that Wayne shot a few years ago (the plant has grown a lot since 1953):

 Here's an aerial view of just the 1953 part of the plant:

 

And here's a curiosity: a very old Tru-Scale kit for scratchbuilding any number of buildings, including our Lime Rock plant, seen in the center of the box cover:

 

And now for a progress report.  Part of my time was spent trading emails with my architect friend Jim Coady, who's been working very hard to create CAD drawings of the rock bins that were on the rock cars of the Mojave Northern railroad that served the cement plant at Victorville.  The plan is get these bins 3D-printed to put on short flat cars.

Here is just the cover page that Jim created for an eight-page set of drawings:

 

This is a very exciting project, and my friends Bill Messecar and Don Hubbard are now involved in the planning too.

The rest of my time was spent cutting and gluing down cork roadbed for the two staging mainlines and then the new five-track storage yard (the "A Yard").  It used to be just three tracks wide, but then I realized that I could squeeze in two more storage tracks if they were stub-ended instead of double-ended like the others.  So I changed the staging loop track plan to look like this:

Notice how the two new inner tracks in the big curve continue straight on Section 11 until they come to a stub end.  Also notice that an extra track now comes off the end of the A Yard ladder in Section 9 and runs back toward the throat.  I might use this to store a couple of locos.

I continued to use the cork turnout pads I had bought, even though they require cutting cork wedges just beyond the pads.  It's frustrating to have to cut all those cork wedges, but I love gluing down the cork with my DAP Alex Plus caulk.  I've got all the cork glued down now for all the tracks on Section 9, as seen here:

The next step will be to continue laying cork around the curve into Section 10 and then Section 11.