Zoom Cereal and Strongheart Packing Company

My friend Al Novak corrected my fading memory as to where I had taken this picture of what I had called the Zoom Cereal factory. I thought for years it was in downtown LA, but was really located in the Central Manufacturing District, in Vernon, being just south a few miles of downtown Los Angeles. This factory, built during the 1930s is really the Strongheart Packing Company, the Zoom Cereal Factory silos seen in the background are part of another industry built during the late 1950 or early 60s.

The Strongheart Packing Company (see red arrow), is shown on this industry switching map of the Los Angeles Junction Railway. Fishers Flouring Mills, known as the Zoom Cereal Factory had its own siding with many spots for rail cars. Strongheart had only one spot but same spur track served other customers such as Union Malleable Company.

I painted weathered the Strongheart building and its on the layout. The model was built much like the prototype, as there is no freight doorway into the building from the loading dock, maybe tank cars were unloaded here by using a large hose line. I also didn't add the smoke stack as the prototype has, because it would have cast a shadow on the backdrop sky. I wanted the building to look old, but as if it were still being used, but not falling apart as seen in the above prototype picture. I added outside details such as the portable steam pump on wooden skids for tank car unloading.

Seen on the metal shed side of the building I changed the model to a sliding door with machine tools inside such as a lathe and mill, this needed for an industry to keep the production equipment in repair.

To begin construction, I started on the central part of the building first. I figured it had a floor space inside of about 24 feet wide, this making the outside 26 feet wide, and the same for the height.

The materials used are plastic brick sheet and Evergreen styrene. I cut the brick sheet to size then cut the window openings following my drawing (seen below). I build up all the windows into the brick sheet using Evergreen HO 2"x 4" for each frame and 2"x 2" stock for the frames. This is done before gluing the walls together making window assembly easy.

Here is the factory somewhat complete, still have more to finish, such as building the metal siding structure seen at the far end, and the loading dock.

I drew the factory in proportion to the photograph. I use door and window openings to figure the size of the building, I didn't take measurements some 30 years ago when I photographed it.