Sometimes a really useful product can slip under the radar a bit ... at least in my case. My 4mm layout was never intended to be anything that a glorified test track with a bit of scenery, and so I wasn't overly concerned that the fiddle yard capacity was rather limited. There are six storage tracks, but only three are of what I'd call a decent length, and two are really only comfortably long enough for a B-set or two car DMU. I was fine with that - it's only a single track cross-country line anyway - but at the back of my mind I wondered if there wouldn't be a way to turn one of the tracks into a long cassette, allowing trains to be lifted on and off in their entirety. My mind started whirring - I'd been looking at various sorts of plastic fitting in B&Q, wondering if anything could be adapted into a cassette - when I began to realise that I'd recently seen an advert for a similar product in one of the magazines, but which I'd never really looked at in depth.

Which mag, though? I scoured back issues of RM, CM, BRM, MR and Loco Revue, all without success - although it must be there somewhere. However, some Googling brought up the website of Train-Safe:

http://www.train-safe.de/

Which was clearly the manufacturer I had in mind.

They do a range of storage products but the ones I was particularly interested in were the "Train-Safe Vision" line, which are basically perspex tubes with rails embedded in them, allowing trains to be driven on and off under power. They do these in a wide variety of scales, track standards and lengths. Some measurement of my fiddle yard showed that I could accommodate the 150cm tubes, allowing for the curves at either end of each loop, but that the next longest tubes, the 180cm ones, would be too long. Nonetheless, a 150cm tube is long enough for a Hall class and five bogie coaches of 57-57ft lengths, provided you use some sort of close-coupling arrangement.

As a comparison, a tube of the same length with also take a 28XX, 13 mineral wagons and a toad, and that's with tension locks - using 3-links or similar, would probably allow another wagon to be squeezed into the rake.

I ordered four of the tubes, together with two track adaptor ections. Like the tubes these are designed for different track standards, so it's good to be careful when ordering.

In order to install the tube, I had to remove 150cm of existing fiddle yard track, plus a few cms either side for the adaptor units. No power needs to be supplied to the tube itself, since it picks up current through slightly sprung contacts when resting in place. The unit is removed by simply lifting it up.

Here's one end of the tube as resting in place. In my case the adaptor is screwed onto a rectangle of MDF, which is turn PVA'd onto the extruded foam boards under the fiddle yard.

And here's looking to the other end, which has exactly the same arrangement.

Because the tubes are manufactured, each one is exactly the same length as the next, so if one fits, they all will, meaning that it's easy to swap entire trains with no fiddling around to ensure good contact and track alignment. Two sliding doors go over the ends to protect the trains when not on the layout. These doors - and the moulded runners in which they slide - are the only areas of the design which felt a bit flimsy to me, but then again as long as you take reasonable care sliding them in and out, they shouldn't break.

In terms of the ease of moving a train around, I found that I could easily handle a complete unit without derailments - and provided there is sufficient room, I was able to turn a unit around so that the train is facing the opposite direction. However, I doubt that I'd have found the 180 cm unit quite as easy to manage. I also found that it helps to have a train nearly filing the length of the tube, so that it doesn't have far to slide up and down the track before bumping against the doors.

They aren't cheap - each tube cost me 116 Euros - but they are evidently well manufactured and if you look at it in terms of the cost of a locomotive, you're effectively buying extra storage capacity for your layout, albeit with the minor hassle of having to lift trains on and off. But that seems like a pretty good trade-off to me. The only very minor downside is that the trains make a heck of a racket running through the tubes - but that's just physics, unfortunately!

I'll be ordering some more eventually, as well as their wall-mounted rack which will just fit on the space above the fiddle yard, allowing three tubes to be held there.

Hope this is of interest to anyone who, like me, wasn't really aware of this very useful product.