Revisiting Victorville's Cement Plant, and Drawing More Staging Tracks

It's time to revisit Victorville's Southwestern Portland Cement Plant, and then we'll look at some progress in drawing more staging tracks.

Here's a photo of Santa Fe 4-8-4 #2903 as it brought railfans to tour the cement plant on Jan. 29, 1950:

 Here's the big sign board they saw at the entrance to the plant:

Here's an excellent trackside view of the whole plant before it was expanded in the 1950s (I plan to model it the way it looked in this view):

Here's a great aerial view into the plant, with the mainlines on the right:

Note the row of kilns in the center, and the open clinker pit with a traveling crane just to the right of there.

This is the USGS map of the plant from that time period:

 And here is my track plan for modeling a compressed version of the plant:

This scene is 48" deep, but there are pop-up access hatches on the far side.

Let's return to that Jan. 29, 1950 tour of the plant.  Here's a view of the ends of the older kilns and the one new, larger kiln above them.  Note the Mojave Northern steam loco hiding in the lower left corner too:

Here we're taking a tour of that new, larger kiln:

 

Here's a rare view into the clinker pit with its overhead traveling crane for moving clinkers around.  Clinkers are the small balls of cement that emerge from the kilns, before they are crushed into powder.

Finally, here's a view of the front of the packing house, with the cement storage silos adjacent:

My friend Wayne Lawson has been building a beautiful model of this packing house in N scale, as you can see here:
 

This concludes our tour of the cement plant.  Next time we'll revisit the Mojave Northern railroad that brought limestone into the plant. 

As for layout progress, I had to pause my work on the benchwork until I could get an idea of where the legs could go to support the next sections, so they wouldn't get in the way of the staging tracks.  So, I've been working on drawing 1/16 scale track plans for the staging tracks as they leave the existing Section 9 and curve through the next sections (Sections 8, 7, and 1).

Here I am, kneeling beside my bed while I work on the track plans:

Today I finished drawing enough of this part of staging so I can decide where the legs can go through the middle of the area.  None of the plan worked out the way I had sketched it about five years ago.  Here's the current track plan for this part of staging (almost too light to read, and subject to change):

In the upper right, both double-track mainlines emerge from Section 9, split into several double-ended storage tracks, and curve around through Section 1 at the bottom of the drawing.  A track that begins climbing into the helix leaves the mainline at the bottom of the drawing and curves off into the helix near the upper right.  A long, curving crossover track connects the two mainlines to form a necessary reverse loop near the top of the drawing.

I was left with a lot of unused space inside all the mainline curves in the center, so I added nine stub-ended storage tracks there (in Section 7).  The empty space between these tracks and the mainline curves is where some critical legs can penetrate the scene.

I haven't yet worked out how all these tracks will connect as they go around the rest of the layout, but I'll work on that as I find the time.  I have enough for now to get back to cutting notches in the tabletop sections for the legs to support them.

Meanwhile, I visited Bill Messecar this week, and he gave me ten of the fourteen Mojave Northern rock cars to take home -- seven empties and three with removable rock loads.  I set them up in my small staging yard on Section 9, coupled on an old Bachmann 0-6-0T as a stand-in for a Mojave Northern 0-6-0T, and tested them.  Here's a photo:

That's all for this time.  I hope to proceed with more benchwork next.