Found it:
Model Railroad Planning 2010 - 5 Approaches to a Track Planning Challenge - page 56
All of the layouts proposed in the article are based in different time periods for the railroads that served the port in Richmond, Califonia (Bay Area, not Los Angeles)...Richmond Pacific, Parr Terminal, and SP/ATSF. The plan and desciption on page 60 describes the CLIC system.
Keith Jordan had a small Santa Fe / LA based layout; but I can't remember if the article I have seen on it was in MR or in the Santa Fe Modeling Society magazine. The time frame of the layout may have pre-dated CLIC books, as well. I have several scans of CLIC books from central Texas; always interesting to peruse them.
There might be mention of CLIC books in one of the recent articles on David Barrow's Lubbock, TX based layout; I seem to recall a diagram of a CLIC book associated with that layout.
It's not ringing a bell Gordie. Andy Sperandeo had a wonderful article and track plan for the San Jacinto District in the Feb. 1980 issue of MR that described the CLIC system (Car Location Inventory Control) and is a layout that would use the CLIC system but he didn't actually use that term or give numbers.
And Chuck Hitchcock's article on his Argentine Industrial District layout in the February 2007 issue of MR did mention CLIC and in fact MR had a very nice and thorough "subscriber extra" on the website about CLIC but it seems to have been taken down in the years since although it is still listed under the issue's contents - it is just a dead link now. Too bad. (I should have printed it out when I had the chance. I do have a CLIC book for an area of the BNSF that I have railfanned in Illinois and wish I had more info about the system.)
Hitchcock also went into a bit of detail about Kansas City industrial railroading in the 2002 issue of Model Railroad Planning.
For a while I wondered if you were thinking of Bob Smaus's multi part series on a Port of Los Angeles layout starting in December 1990 MR and running for I think 6 parts but the layout does not fit your description and the articles make no mention of CLIC or how to operate it.
So, sorry but I hit a brick wall on this one. Maybe Stephen Priest knows where to find it?
Dave Nelson
I am trying to locate an article, or it could even have been one of The Operators columns which was about using CLIC codes to identify tracks and then use those to workout which tracks a switch crew would work.
I know the article had a track plan of a proposed layout that was loosely based on the Port of LA. It had a veritcal yard to the left of the plan and it had industries to the righthand side of the plan.
Does anyone else remember this article?