Ok just fixed something from my scrap box rip track that has been there nearly 40 years… a Train Miniature transfer caboose. If I remember right it was a victim of a cat induced fall when my layout was in my parents garage…railings were broken and missing on the sides. I would up building new ones from scratch Monday night. I toted that thing around for years in the rip track drawer that was just above my scrap box drawers. (one of those six drawer plastic units) It has been in 10 moves.
If that wasn’t bad enough in the process I was looking for the end railings one thing led to another and I started cleaning out the scrap box. Good night what was going on here… the end off a Faller greenhouse that I remember buying when I was probably 12 or 13… and I am 55! Then I found other bits and pieces nearly as old. Why am I saving this stuff? On the neater side I did find the body for the caboose that was my first purchase at a train show. Saving that but threw out a bunch of useless stuff leftover from buildings long gone. I remember as a young tween or teen reading an article by Art Curren (appropriately enough since my last name is Curran) that mentioned saving leftover parts in a scrapbox. Guess I took it to heart.
I am not sure what scares me more the fact that I saved all these tiny us
Oh, man. Jim, I have something I need to show you. I’m at work in a virtual meeting right now, listening to blah blah, but I’ll post it a little later. I just turned 60. “Hi, I’m Matt (Hi Matt)…”
Wait, it’s not just me? I didn’t know there was a support group for this!
You could say I’m a little ahead of the curve though. I went through my old boxes of stuff that I had been toting around forever (at least 10 moves with my own stuff). I finally parted ways with a handfull of buildings that I’ve had since I was 8 or 9 (I’m 45 now). Great memories associated with them, but man they were in rough shape! My old Life-Like, Tyco, and Bachmann rolling stock from back then is also in rough shape, doesn’t fit my layout at all, and isn’t going anywhere!
Trucks that don’t roll well, generally speaking, I just threw away when they were replaced by better freight car trucks.
Wreck damaged equipment: My father had commented when I was a child that HO trains were basically throw away trains (as compared to the Lionel that he had owned that actually lasted forever), so when they broke beyond a simple repair, I just did not keep them. I will repair whatever I can up to a certain point, but then will also strip for spare parts (generally Kadee couplers and good Genesis level or better trucks).
I have no old parts laying around except a few wheelsets and maybe one set of Walthers passenger car trucks and selected brand new replacement parts from Tangent and Exactrail for their rolling stock. Oh, I have one complete set of yellow handrails for the next time I own an Athearn SD45T-2 Kodachrome unit (this is because many Athearn units have some handrail issues).
I just don’t keep old stuff or even freight cars that I’m not using regularly or don’t want to use regularly. If I don’t need it, I sell it for whatever I can get. At the last train show my used, reasonably-priced books sold exceptionally well.
I do invest in new or better quality replacement detail parts for my engines when something falls off and gets lost, so I have some small parts like correct size lift rings and metal fuel fills coming in the mail.
However, I’m not hoarding anything. All the engines and rolling stock are either on the layout or two shelves above the layout, and everything gets run. The best locos are on a high shelf that the cat can’t get to, whenever they are not running.
I guess getting my layout itself reasonably close to completion has caused me to kind of clean up some stuff. Getting it ready to be on last falls National Narrow Gauge convention’s layout tour was a lot of incentive to get the layout reasonably done. Didn’t have many through as we were a ways out from Hickory but it got me going with it.
I have been gradually getting things organized and getting rid of some stuff but the scrapbox was something that had been never really cleaned up. Mind you I have tons of car and loco projects to do and still a few things to scratchbuild on the layout plus a lot of detailing. (and stuff to build for the club) I have been trying to get stuff better organized where I can find things too. My wife found this little gem over at the Habitat thrift store for $5 and I got my detailing parts organized. Just roll it in by my workbench when I need it.
The problem with almost never throwing anything away lies in that word “almost.” It is better to either always keep or always throw. That word almost is why you can spend fruitless hours looking for that oddball something that you know you once had and now need but in fact you actually did throw it away.
Throwing something away is the surest way to guarantee that you’ll find a need for it half a year (or longer) later.
Somebody mentioned Art Curren, the master at kit mingling [he felt the British term kit-bashing sounded violent]. I attended his estate sale and can testify he kept little tidbits. I bought a plastic bag of bits from various uses he had made of the old LifeLike Mt Vernon Mfg Co kit which was one of his favorites. I always intended to incorporate those bits into my own kitbashes as a way of honoring his memory.
I’m also reminded that even bits of the low end Tyco diesels made their way into Art Curren structures as vents or electrical cabinets.
drgwcs, that’s a beautiful thing. The retail rack makes me think I should buy all those things.
By stark contrast, look at this little shoebox, which I’ve been dragging around for half a century.
Note that it has a cardboard “work surface” that you can pull out from the bottom using the handy tab. Also note the paper clip sticking through the top at the far end – that will come to play in a moment. This was the scratchbuilder’s kit that I made. I re-rediscovered it a few months ago and was astonished, not only by all the clever functionality it has but also how utterly unnecessary and useless it proved to be. Basically it became a junk box.
Let’s have a look inside, shall we?
Inside the lid is a pocket for ORDER FORMS. Inside this pocket there is still an order form for Terminal Hobby Shop of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (“It’s easy to order from Terminal Hobby Shop!”). The top portion of the inside of the box contains a tray with cardboard dividers, resembling a tackle-box tray. Here be strips of wood, scraps of sandpaper, a syringe, a tube of glue, a box of barrells, crossing signs, windows and other details and parts, and more. If you slide the paper-clip south, you can open a sort of reverse or “top-fastened” Rolodex of suppliers in my town, which at this time was a small, fish-and-timber town where the coffee smelled worse than the harbor.
Here we see the Rolodex in action. North End Hobby Center, Seattle Rail Supply, Webster Supply Inc. Address, phone numbers, and hours of operation. Everything you needed (all of them long gone, of course).
Matt that is a pretty neat time capsule you have there. Over time I have bought a few lots- The styrene and a lot of other sheet material I bought in a file box full of stuff for $10. The stripwood I got as a lot along with a bunch of other stuff for a very reasonable price- It has brought me a lot of fun scratchbuilding. One whole town has come out of it. Along with it were two cigar boxes of old paper sided car kits- I am sure I am at least the third or 4th owner…little time capsule.
Finding stuff- that is the problem… that is why I am trying to get stuff better organized. That way people especially family does not think I am any crazier than I already am. [:-^] When I did the stripwood bucket a couple of years ago I was out on the porch drilling holes in the bucket lid with a paddle bit to put the stripwood in. Our youngest (at the time 13) walked out- saw me with the drill- watched for a second with quite a look on his face then turned around into the kitchen. He then told mom “Dad’s lost it- he’s out on the porch drilling holes in a bucket!” [(-D] My wife and I were rolling on the floor laughing…
A long time ago I decided to put metal wheels on all of my freight cars. Foolishly I threw the plastic wheelsets away. Now I have a bunch of Athearn BB cars that I want to sell. Apparently I’m going to have to let the metal wheels go with them because I can’t change them back to plastic wheels.[D)]
I used to keep every scrap of plastic or metal regardless of size. I ended up with two BB boxes 3/4s full of stuff. It took me a while to realize that I was wasting my time searching through them because things were rarely the exact size. I kept the brass tubes and tossed the rest.
@crossthedog, that little shoe box reminds my of the ‘‘old days’’ when a man would have his tools and some materials in a handmade by himself, wooded box and travel/walk from town to town and make repaires for people that had broken items, and make some money or traded for a meal. That box of yours is a ‘‘collectors item’’.
Believe it or not, I still have 2 Blue Box Athearn SD40-2’s that I bought when I was building my first “permanent” layout. One is in blue/yellow Warbonnet colors. The other was a Bicentennial model. The Santa Fe model got repainted in MoPac colors when I started on my current layout. The Bicentennial model is in its original box. I guess one day, I’ll remotor it with a modern can motor and put it back into service.
There are probably a ton of the old Blue Box in service still. One of them qualifies as runner up for oldest project repaired from the scrapbox for me. I had a custom painted Rio Grande Blue Box SD-9- the type with metal trucks and the wide hood but the paint was very nice. It was up at the club I belonged to in Oklahoma when a former member broke in and stole a bunch of stuff. We eventually caught the guy and most of the stuff was recovered. I had this engine and a shay that were damaged. The trucks and several driveline parts were broken. Never found the parts for the older trucks. All that happened about 89 or so. The SD9’s seemed to be pretty rare in the swap meets I went to. Fast forward to 2 years ago- I found a donor engine for 20 at a Lindy’s Trains location outside of Charlotte. The sad thing is that I still saved the extra parts… Hi I’m Jim (Hi Jim) and I have a train problem.
I have lots of stuff I bought over thirty years ago that never saw the light of my train room, either in my old house or my current one. Some of them I had forgotten about and discovered recently. I found an Athearn BB Trainmaster still in its original box. I’m considering adding a decoder and painting it for my current fictional road. The prize is a craftsman 300 ton Fairbanks Morse coaling tower which I bought about 40 years ago. I intended to build it right after I bought it but never got around to it on my old layout and on my current one, I got a Walthers plastic kit for my main engine servicing facility. There really isn’t an appropriate place for it unless I use it to replace the Walthers coaling tower which I like. I might get around to building it someday and will then have to decide whether to replace the Walters tower or build a diorama for it.
The first engine I chose for myself (at what I think was Caboose Hobbies – what was the store in the basement of West 43rd or thereabouts?) was a Tyco GP20 painted for the Reading. (I was planning on an RS3, similar to the ones I loved seeing on the Erie Northern Branch trains, and similar to the CNJ RSDs I got to run on my fourth birthday… but it had a jewel rather than a bulb for a headlight… strange, the things that ‘matter’ when you’re 6).
This came with a glassine envelope with a full set of metal handrails. I was paranoid as a kid that these would be damaged if I put them on, so I carefully stored them in a box.
Around age 15 I rediscovered the railings, and… decided not to put them on yet.
Around 1997 I consolidated a bunch of stuff after a move, and reunited the engine with the glassine envelope (they were in two wildly different locations by then!) and… decided not to put them on quite yet.
I am looking at the envelope with the railings, which I recovered a couple of months ago from storage. I know where the engine is. It is not time to put them on quite yet.
