Revisiting Victorville's Barrio, and Building More Layout Section Frames

This time we'll revisit the part of the barrio in Victorville that I plan to model, and then we'll look at more progress in building frames for more of the plywood sections for the lower deck.

The first street on the far side of the tracks from downtown Victorville was E Street, which was the street that led to the big cement plant just outside the town.  Many Hispanic and Black cement plant workers and their families lived along and near E Street, in the neighborhood they called the barrio.

We can only get glimpses of the former buildings there in the backgrounds of various photos and in some old aerial photos.  A color photo we saw last time, shot by Chard Walker in 1950, shows UP's early double-ended gas turbine #50 during a test run there:

To the right of the loco we can see two important structures that I plan to model -- the scalloped facade of a Spanish-style meeting hall that became a church, and several propane tanks on the grounds of a propane dealer.

The church building is long gone, but the church community still exists in the Victorville area, so I contacted them and got a scan of an old close-up of the building's facade:
 

This was the Emmanuel Temple CME church (the painter misspelled the name, so I'll do that too when I model it).

Let's look at my track plan for the barrio area on my layout:

Notice E Street running through the area, with the church located between 3rd and 4th Streets.  Across the street from the church was the propane dealer, named the Southwest Gas Corporation, which was apparently served by tank cars parked there on the outfit spur for unloading.

Here's a 1940 aerial view of this area:

The mainlines and sidings and spurs are on the left, and just to the right of there, at the bottom of the photo, is the propane dealer, with a row of shade trees on the far side.  

From left to right on the property, there's a very small building that may be a pump house, then the office building, then three small propane tanks in a row, before we come to E Street.  By 1950 they had added a fourth, larger propane tank near the street, as is visible in the UP gas turbine photo, in front of the church in that photo.

In the aerial photo above, we can also see the church, which has the long, white roof across the street from the propane dealer.

Here's a partial view of this area in the background of a 1946 photo:

The three smaller propane tanks are very visible here.  And this brings us to the third landmark building of this area, which was the second-hand store visible behind the tanks (and across the street).  My track plan above shows the store at the corner of 4th and E Streets.  During most of the postwar decade, this store was named Carr's Furniture, according to the old phone books.

Here's a circa-1945 aerial photo showing this area from another angle:

The second-hand store (Carr's Furniture) is very visible near the right edge, and the CME Church with the scalloped facade is very visible near the left edge.  The propane dealer is across the street from the church, hidden among the shade trees, but a couple of the small propane tanks can be seen if you look closely.  The other buildings along E Street were the homes of the residents there.

The Southwest Gas Corporation had their headquarters in Barstow, as can be seen in this old photo from their history website:

I could include a sign board similar to this at my Victorville plant.

As for the homes in the barrio, many of them are still there and visible from Google's Street View:

 

  

I plan to model these using available kits for cabins and company houses, such as this Blair Line company house:

This concludes our second visit to the barrio part of my future layout.  Now let's look at a little more progress I've made with my lower deck benchwork.

Last time I had mounted the frame of Section 8 up on legs and was about to attach the legs, but then I realized that some of the legs would end up in the middle of the lower deck staging tracks, so I needed to finally draw an exact plan for the staging mainlines and yards on the lower deck before proceeding with the legs.

But I didn't feel like track planning, as I was enjoying the benchwork, so I just kept on building more frames for more plywood sections.  The next one to build after Section 8 was Section 7, and we can see the frame of Section 7 on top of its plywood shape on the floor here (with Section 8 on temporary legs behind it):

Then came the smaller Section 6A (clamped to Section 7):

Onward to the larger Section 6's frame:

 

And here is the most recent one I've completed, the even larger Section 5 (butting up against Section 6 behind it):

I ran out of 1x4s, so I had to bring another 22 boards home, which you can see stacked on the floor next to Sections 5 and 6.

The many odd angles where the edge boards meet in the frames are a pain to connect.  I use short connector boards (cut at odd angles) and screw into them from both of the side boards, as you can see at the far end in this opposite view of Section 5:

 

I think I'll continue to postpone the track planning for the lower deck staging yards and keep on building more of these frames, while I'm on a roll.