This time we'll cover the Union Pacific's Los Angeles Limited passenger train in Victorville from l949 into 1952, and then we'll look at four weeks of work on locating flextracks to form the rest of the 10-track A Yard, where the tracks continue around the big curve at the end of the peninsula and then fill most of the other side of the peninsula.
For this third report on the LA Limited passenger train, I'll be using information kindly supplied again by UP researcher Jeff Koeller, as follows:
[To be added later.]
Thanks to Jeff Koeller for all of the above text, photos with captions, and consist table.
Here are some notes on modeling this train in HO:
[To be added later.]
I always like to look up what the train times through Victorville were.
[To be added later.]
As for layout progress since last time, on April 12 I wrote this first bi-weekly report:
Last
time I wasn't happy with the arrangement of turnouts at the left end of
the ten A Yard staging tracks, so I pulled out the temporary track pins
and tried a different arrangement, as seen here:
On the right in this view, we now have three turnouts along Track A1 instead of the four we had last time, but I still wasn't happy that Tracks A1 through A4 end so soon. I wanted them to extend as far as possible before ending in turnouts. So here was my next try:
This looked much better, with Tracks A1
and A2 not coming together until the curve in the foreground, and Tracks
A3-A4-A5 extending well around the curve. During this time, I had
received 20 more flextracks to use in this yard, plus six #6 left-hand
Atlas turnouts from eBay. A little later I sent for another 20
flextracks from eBay, seeing that I would need more, and with any extras
available for the future helix tracks.
Meanwhile,
I had met with Bill Messecar and Don Hubbard for lunch on April 1,
where Don gave me his completed model of the Standard Oil dealer lot in
Victorville. Back at my layout, I set his previously-completed model of
the warehouse-office on his lot, and Craig Wisch's garage model beside
the lot. Here's a photo looking toward the row of three horizontal oil
tanks Don built (ignore the staging tracks under the models):
And here's a view looking from the other direction, toward the truck garage built by Craig:
Many thanks to Don and to Craig for these beautiful models!
Meanwhile,
Bill Messecar has been working almost every day on scratch-building me a
model of the Victorville stock pen, using the Santa Fe structure
standards and this plan drawing in the Victorville Building Records:
I've been phoning Don Sheets to discuss
this and other Victorville structures. He's now 97 years old but still
recalls almost every detail from 70 to 80 years ago! He said he never
saw this stock pen used, but the one by the ranch at Frost was used to
ship cattle out, so that's how I will be using this pen too.
The
two low, wide Union Oil tanks that Craig Wisch recently built for me
from cardstock arrived here safely, so I set up a complete scene on top
of my staging tracks, with the two wide tanks at the left, the four tall
tanks in the middle, and the two shorter tanks on the right, with the
large warehouse-office building in the foreground. All of these
cardstock models came from Craig Wisch:
The curving track on the right represents one leg of the wye, and the spur track hidden behind the tanks is the Union Oil spur. I still need to add some catwalks to the tall tanks and some ladders to all of them. Here's a circa-1945 aerial view of this same scene:
I've been inviting Craig to try building a
Shell Oil dealer model or any building within the large cement plant,
but no luck so far.
Meanwhile,
I worked some more on pinning down the ten tracks of the A Yard and the
half-dozen tracks of the stub-ended D Yard, which is for parking diesel
sets. Here's a new view from yesterday, looking from the yard tracks
toward the throats at the left ends of the tracks:
And here's an opposite view, looking from the throats out to the many yard tracks:
As you can see, the turnouts are just
sitting loose on top of the tracks, as I continue to try to optimize the
track lengths and curve radii. I will keep trying different
arrangements until I'm happy with the result, and then I'll cut and fit
all the tracks and turnouts together. The tracks no longer match the
way I had drawn them on my pencil track plan long ago.
Please get in touch if you can help me in any way, in person or by building HO models remotely.
My next biweekly report was written on April 26:
I've been working on my staging yard tracks for at least an hour almost
every day for the last two weeks. Last time I had pinned them all down
into some initial locations, but I went back to the 10-track curve that
comes around the end of the peninsula and spaced them out equally to
make nicer-looking curves:
The
white poster-board shape in the upper right has a 36" radius on its
outer edge (to match the inner mainline track there), and Tracks A1 to
A6 all have radii of 36" or more, while Tracks A7 to A10 have sharper
radii, not suited to the biggest steam locos.
Moving
the curves meant also moving all the straight tracks connected to them,
so I unpinned and moved all of them as needed to meet the curves. Then
I used rail joiners to connect the flextrack sections of Tracks A6 to
A10, which had not yet been connected.
A
local friend, Jon McWirter, whom I had met at the local Santa Fe
Mini-Meets, contacted me and offered to build the Victorville Switching
Station for the future Lower Narrows scene on my layout. Craig Wisch
had already built the beautiful control house, so it was the massive
electrical parts that were still needed. Luckily, Jon is a professional
working on converting nuclear energy to electrical energy, so he knows
about such things.
Before
his arrival on Monday, April 20, I cleared off the part of the lower
deck that is directly under where the switching station scene will go. I
decided that we could use a little more space there, so I marked my
track plan in red ink to show where the aisle could be a little less
wide on the upper level there:
Note that the branch line to George AFB will form the rear boundary of the available space.
Then
I cut out two sections of poster board to fill that area, so Jon would
have a template of the space he has to work with. Here's a view of the
poster board template to the left of the control house (along with a
pile of four plastic kits for substations, if Jon can use any of them):
And here's a view of the template to the right of the control house:
When Jon got here at 5 p.m. that day, I gave him a tour of the layout, and then, before I took him out to dinner, I had him pose with the connected poster boards, showing the space he has to work within (those empty slots can also be filled in):
Later I sent him many views of the prototype switching station area, such as this one:
Jon
has been searching for kits that might provide the gantry towers that
he needs, and here is the kit he initially chose but then canceled, from
Cosmic in Japan:
The
control house part of the kit would not be needed, of course. So, I'm
thrilled to have a new volunteer to help me with one of my many
Victorville structures!
Speaking
of helpers, Bill Messecar has been working almost every day on
scratch-building the Victorville stock pen and is nearly finished,
except for the dirt and some cattle. I located an aerial photo from
c.1945 showing the stock pen in the left part of this photo, with
Standard Oil near the right edge, and Texas Quarries along the river at
the bottom:
There
appears to be a boxcar parked in front of the leftmost pen (not where
the loading ramp is, on the right end), probably waiting to be spotted
at the Lime Rock plant, off to the left of this view.
Meanwhile,
Craig Wisch in Victorville is taking a break from my projects and
working on his own S-scale model of the Stewart Hotel, which was across D
Street from the depot (and so, not on my layout).
Back
on the layout, after connecting all the flextrack sections in the body
of the A Yard (but not yet gluing any of them down), I worked on
bringing some the those tracks together at the throat at the left end.
First I cut and fit the ends of Tracks A1 and A2 into a turnout, and
then I cut and fit Track A3 into a turnout that joins A3 with A1-A2.
There was a lot of trial and error in cutting the tracks with a Dremel
tool to get the exact lengths needed.
My
next step was to cut and fit Tracks A6 and A7 into a turnout. But then
I decided I should rearrange the other throat turnouts so that A1 to A5
form one electrical block, while A6 to A10 form a second block, as they
do at the opposite ends of these staging tracks. So I loosely laid out
some new turnout locations in the throat. And I found that I can
probably fit seven stub tracks (instead of four) into the adjacent D
Yard, for storing more diesel sets in blocks.
Here's a current view of the A and D Yard tracks and turnouts, loosely laid in their possible locations:
And here's one last view, from farther left, showing how the turnouts in the throat may be arranged:
There
is still a ton of work to do on cutting and fitting all these tracks
and turnouts together. And I need to order more powered switch machines
for the many turnouts. I haven't tested whether the older switch
machines actually work, so I'm worried about that. And then all these
tracks need to be glued down, one track at a time.
If you can help, in person or remotely, please let me know.
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