A-Line Storage Boxes

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

I received a couple sets of A-Line storage boxes as part of my birthday. They were a month behind in getting here. I have a few questions.

  1. Are they high quality?

  2. Will they wear the finish off of locos and rolling stock (especially the new Walther’s Superliners)?

  3. Are they durable?

I don’t have a permanent layout yet. All I have is some Bachmann EZ track that I put on the floor occasionally.

Thanks

2

My opinion: 1. Yes 2. I got some of A-line’s thin white sheet plastic foam and made cradles for each car–I use the cradles to place and remove the cars. I would expect the foam to minimize abrasion. I also put the supplied grey foam strips in the bottom of the boxes–I think this cuts down a bit on the car’s tendency to roll. I also use their grey plastic foam “blocks” as bumpers on the end of each row. 3. Yes It’s “fun” learning how to assemble the boxes; but once learned, no biggy. Ed

3

For some reason my just submitted post didn’t separate into the paragraphs as I wrote them–everything’s just jammed together. Anyone know why? Ed

4

  1. When I got my first set, I wondered about how they would be since they appeared to be just cardboard. However, I got them assembled (watch out for paper cuts!), and they are very well designed. I’d been previously using keyboard boxes with cardboard strips between equipment, and these are much better.

  2. I’ve never had any problems with equipment shifting or getting damaged in mine.

  3. They are very durable. Granted, I would go sitting on them or anything like that, but they will do the job at protecting your equipment at an affordable price.

Kevin

5

I use them, I even have the bag. My fellow club members use them constantly. One guy has probably 30 full boxes stacked in his basement, and uses a database to keep track of them all. He even has a full 110 car bathtub gon train in two bags (4 boxes per bag)…and yes, that’s HO scale.

1). They are very nice boxes. I don’t know about “high” quality (the cars still rattle around a little…I think a “high quality” box wouldn’t allow that), but they work as advertised. What would probably improve them is some foam on the underside of the lid for cars (not for engines, however…lots of detail parts to lose).

2). I have seen some wear on some paint jobs on locos (not cars). The cab sides of this RS-11 I have now have a little shiny spot on it, matching the height of the cardboard divider. Using their thin foam sheets would stop that from happening (which I’m getting).

3). They are very durable. I’ve never seen one fail or fall apart. The cardboard box is quite strong, and is not flimsy at all.

They are available in two different sizes. Get the tall ones for locos (I snapped off a pair of horns on a PA-1 by putting it in a short box) and for modern cars like double stacks, autoracks, and high-cube cars. You can use the short ones for most old freight equipment like 40’ boxcars, etc. The short ones can be stacked 5 high where one can normally only stack 4 tall ones.

Get the foam blocks from A-Line as well. They are well worth the money, IMHO.

Also, if you’re not getting a bag for these, buy big rubberbands and always put one around the box when there’s something in it. I’ve seen a couple people drop these boxes full of cars because they didn’t secure the lid. Either use a rubberband or a velcro strip or twine or something to keep the lids on. If you do drop the bo

6

Can I ask how much they cost you? they seemed a bit on the pricey side when I last looked, especially when compared to the $5 cardboard boxes I get from our local sports card shop that have dividing rows and lids (although no foam, and I wouldn’t use the card boxes for anything but shelf storage - defiantly not for transport.)

7

After years of using heavy home made wooden trays, I switched over to the A-Line cases and bags last year.

I love them. They’re lighter and more portable than my old wood trays.

When I assembled mine, I went an extra step and used wood glue to reinforce the folded tabs. It’s probably not really necessary, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I strongly agree with Paul that the foam blocks are useful. Since I wanted to have some blocks that were a bit larger than A-Line’s, I went to the craft store and bought some 1" thick foam rubber padding, cut it into strips, then cut it to the lengths I needed for the particular equipment I planned to store in each box.

So far, I have two of the low cases. Next up will be a set of the deeper trays for my Superliner cars.

Sure, they’re not cheap, but they do go on sale from time to time. As I write this on the morning of Nov. 19, Walthers has them marked down with the entire case/tray systems at $8-10 off. My local shop applies its regular discounts to that lower price.

A few other members of my modular club have started buying them. An unexpected benefit we’ve found is that they make the pile of storage/transport boxes at our modular setups look less chaotic and junky.

8

Are you typing your answer on line or using a word processor and then uploading? If typing online just hit the enter key a couple of times at the end of each paragraph. The default for my IE7 is to insert a blank line between paragraphs when I press Enter one time, like so.

If you’re typing it off line and then uploading, try hitting the Enter key twice at the end of each paragraph. The problem could be related to the word processor you’re using not sending the correct code for the Enter key.

9

I am typing online. I did hit the enter key several times, and the spacing happened during the composition phase. However, when it was fully published to the forum, the “paragraphing” disappeared. The problem was also discussed on another post (“How to indent paragraphs?”), but it appears that the forum owners can’t find an answer (or don’t want to bother). On the off-chance that the problem has fixed itself, I’ll now hit “enter” a couple of times and type something. Something, something, something. OK, it’s made a new paragraph. Let’s see if it follows through onto the actual forum. By the way, thanks for taking the time to try to help. Ed

10

Gosh, gee whiz. The forum software still wants to run all my typing into one continuous blob. I’ll note that in times previous, I was able to make paragraphs. Well, I’m sure the wizards at Forum-Central will soon have this puzzled out. Ed

11

Ed,

What browser are you using?

I just hit ‘Enter’ once after my question mark and my text gets a double-space as desired.

Don Z.

12

Don, I’m using Opera. I’ll try Firefox and see what happens. Ed

13

Now I’m using Firefox. I’ll hit the “Enter” twice and try to make a paragraph.

That was twice–should be a new paragraph.

Ed

14

OK, it looks like this forum doesn’t work well with Opera. Maybe I’ll use Firefox, although Opera has been pretty good elsewhere. Forum owners, did you test the new forum on Opera???

Ed

PS: Don, thanks for bringing up the browser possibility. Ed

15

It doesn’t even work very well with IE6, so I sincerely doubt that they tested Opera.

I am a little burned out on reporting bugs when there is no visible progress on fixing the bugs, but why don’t you send an email or PM to Bergie to report another bug in the new forum software ?

Who knows, maybe it would be easy to fix, even for the people who programmed the new forum software?

Here is the link to the post he made in the Community Assistance Forum about already known bugs and how to report new bugs:

http://cs.trains.com/trccs/forums/t/139934.aspx

Stein

16

I like the cases for storage. But I still use a hardshell guitar case to travel with my grain units( I use alot of grey foam…nothing rolls/clinks/bunchs up…). Oh. Guitar case came from Goodwill…

I’m using IE7 on this forum…hhmmmnnn…