Over the last few years whilst planning a layout but not having enough spare time to build it I filled a lot of odd hours preparing rolling stock. Much came in secondhand, so there were general repairs, weathering and minor upgrading in progress. This Blog will be the story of ongoing cut'n'shut jobs to produce things I want but can't get RTR together with buildings and other jobs in the railway room

A big problem is storage. This topic comes up repeatedly around the site. My work in progress usually resies in small cardboard or plastic trays recovered from various packaging. Whilst this is OK for throwing bit in for later use when stripping a model it isn't much use for keeping stock in a handy place when not on the layout. Cardboard stock boxes seem fine for long-tern storage but don't look robust enough for what I had in mind. Plastic boxes from Really Useful Box are good, I've got several for various purposes but they tend to be a bit pricey.

Being ever a bit of a bodger I headed off to my timber stock to try some experiments. I found a few nice offcuts of nominal 3" x 1/2" strip and a lot of 6mm pine offcuts. I looked at sizes, already having an IKEA cabinet with drawers of a similar depth which I use for tools and materials. The cabinet is about 24" x 18" so I set about making some trays that size. Strips if 3/16" wood were fixed across inside the bottom to stop the stock from from moving around. Now for testing time. I filled a tray. Great - it held about 60 wagons. I put 16 coaches quite easily in the next, with a little bit of modification to the strips it went up to 18.

Then I tried locos. Disaster. The full tray was too heavy to handle and awkward to get in and out of the shelves. Back to the drawing board. I decided to cut a tray in half, producing two trays 18" x 12". These turned out to be much easier to handle and held 28 wagons each. The othe was done as well which gave me room to store over 100 4-wheelers of 9', 10' and 12' wheelbase. The finished article looks like this.

Now off to modify to take coaches and locos. then build a rack under the layout for storage