Hey there everyone
I was wondering where you guys keep rolling stock that’s not on the layout. I keep mine on a 3 foot shelf under my layout.
Jeremy
I have two places where I keep my rolling stock.
The pieces that I have boxes for I keep in a locked display cabinet & those with boxes, which is isually the stuff I’ve bought in the past 6 years, I’ve made a shelving unit for them under the benchwork which is rapidly getting short of space.
Gordon
If I own it, it’s on the layout. Empty boxes go under the layout.
I use the boxes that paper comes in (10 reams per box) and then I make trays from the brown cardboard soda pop cases (the ones that hold a case of 24 that the soda machines take) I then cut down the sides of the soda pop brown trays to 1 ¾” high. This will allow an HO car to stand upright. I use cardboard strips as separators. The tray will hold about 10 to 15 cars per tray.
I then stack 4 trays into the cardboard paper box with a cardboard separator between each tray. This larger separator is made to just fit into the box (11” x 17”) I cut little corner pieces off the large separator so that I can easily pull the separator out. The separator holds the soda pop trays from touching the cars under them and also keeps the heavy trays from putting any pressure on the lower trays.
I stack them 3 high under the layout. If you watch where you put the leg holding the front of the layout you can stack 24 of them side by side in 25 ft of layout space (that’s 72 boxes for cars, engines, scenery material, buildings, etc.) I then number each box and make a list of the contents of each box and keep this in a 3 ring binder. You won’t believe the time savings when you want a certain car or engine and just look in the notebook.
Yes it takes a little work in the beginning but the time saved later on will repay the time spent many times over!
BOB H Clarion, PA
i have some of the stuff that i don’t use in a rubbermade tub under my layout, most likely i’ll sell that stuff at the next show that my friend goes to so i can get some more money. its a bunch of woodsided boxcars which are to old for what i’m going to model. i just got them because they were Great Northern, bad idea. otherwise almost all of my rolling stock is on my layout. i keep the boxes stacked up under the layout as well so i want to take something off the box is right there.
I stuff what I can into all the sidings I can find…then the rest go in boxes…
Here on the new, revised and re-revised Little River & Hobart its 16 hideout tracks each long enough to hold an 8 car consist plus head end power. Including one 20 footer, and one 15 footer for our long cross-country passenger consists and their M/U head end power.
Plus a classification and transfer yards with 21 tracks averaging eight feet and set up for two working yard switchers plus. A&D tracks with a separate lead to the engine service area, roundtable etc.
Separate coach yards and hideout for our work trains under the industrial suburb of our major city. The lead to that is alongside the engine shop and simply disappears behind the building.
I suppose SOMEDAY we’ll have more flanged wheels than we have track for but it’ll be awhile. We devoted a lot of under-bench space to those hide-out tracks. Monitored for full/empty by photo cells with indicators back at the control panel.
We’re convinced that multi-level is where its at. Hope our 8.6 percent grades (15.5 inches in 15 linear feet) don’t bite us when we get this new layout working. Please See separate post regarding that.
If you’re out of storage space for rolling stock, think multi-level. Boxes can be carefully flattened, packed and stored away from the railroad. Ours are down in the barn in the old hay-loft.
On the tracks, on the layout, where else could you possibly put rolling stock???
As much as possible on layout. The remainder goes in original boxes (all kits), on shelves in the living room (wife doesn’t like it), and on flextrack on shelves in my offices (great conversation starter/relationship buider). My only problem is that I don’t have enough!
Three old dresser drawers that I’ve subdivided. My yard is kind of small, consists mainly of a PFE icing plant and a locomotive servicing facility. I have designs on the other side of the garage in the future, and will hopefully have a 6-track storage yard for a lot of the rolling stock. Still trying to figure out why I can’t go into my LHS and pass up a new reefer kit–oh, well–
Tom
I built a set of vertical shelves out of pine skirting-board (hope that’s what u call it in the US) molding that had a groove in the back just right for HO models to sit in. Holds 70+ cars for fiddling on and off the layout. That was going to be plenty. Why would I need storage for more than 70 cars?
The [:I]overflow[:I] are in their boxes on shelves
I have a dummy loco on my parents mantle, and the rest are on a TV stand in the other room till I get the track laid
I started storing mine in the car cases advertised in Model Railroader (I believe the manufacturer is Axion Technologies). The cases in HO nominally hold 16 40’ cars, but I sometimes can stack them (flat cars especially) to hold quite a few more. I don’t have a home layout (yet) but do have a club sectional layout to operate on. I store cars by either like cars (all 2-bay hoppers or 40’ stock cars) or by specific train (SP’s “Zipper” overnight merchandise freight or a specific passenger train). The car cases enable me to go to exactly what I want to run immediately. Everything is inventoried, too. I got tired of all the small boxes, so they are stored elsewhere. The foam of the car cases is lined with felt to prevent the potential for damage to the paint / decals of the cars from long-term storage. I’ve been very satisfied with this arrangement.
Mark C.
Each of my cars go back in a box, wrapped in a thick paper towel. The box is then put on one of the shelves. They are grouped on the shelves by size or age. (I change eras frequently) I get extra boxes off eBay to cradle my dear train cars without homes. Less loved cars get put in a long cushioned box.
Any car which keeps getting bypassed on the shelf or gives me grief goes in my “to sell” pile. That or I give them to one of my fellow modelers.
I have display shelves in the layout room with 10" pieces of track affixed all over them!
Since all of my operating is done on HO scale modules, all of my rolling stock is stored on shelves. They are one foot wide and eight feet long, and there are five shelves. The rolling stock is four wide on the shelves. Great dust magnets, but I storing them any other way would take up even more room. I have a six foot shelf on the ledge above my workbench and computer desk and it has four tracks. Much of my “in progress” models are parked there. Some have been there for a long time!
By the way my three pairs of modules are kept folded up and are not available for storage of rolling stock.
Bob Boudreau
Part of the reason my yard is 50% of my 12-foot long layout is to hold rolling stock where it can be seen. All of the up-to-snuff rolling stock is there. I don’t have an engine facility built (yet) so my engines are in a small gray metal tool case with drawers divided into approximately HO scale car/engine size.
I also have a stack of unbuilt kits (ranging from Athearn shake-the-box to Labelle wood kits) on a shelf that I hit up for an afternoon project once in a while. Right now my yard’s capacity is 36 cars and I only have about half that on the tracks–I figure if I have enough rolling stock to completely fill the yard (which I can easily cobble up without buying another kit) I can shuffle about half of them out to various sidings and keep the yard about 50% filled.
Our club is in the process of building a very large but shallow drawer under one section. The drawer will have straight sections of unpowered track for the cars to sit on. Maybe in the future we’ll design a proper traverser but for now this is a perfect soloution to our storage problem. Our club moved four years ago and things kind of got hurriedly boxed. Much of our collection remains in boxes to this day and I shuddder to think of just how much damage they are sistaining as a result.
Jesse
My layout has room for about 75 cars in the staging tracks and on the industry spurs(they are not worked real heavy - about 1/3rd full). I have over 100 cars that fit my era, so I am in the process of building a set of sliding trays that will hold ‘long term’ off line cars.
The rest of the collection is displayed on wall mounted shelves, and all my cars have boxes which are labeled/stored on shelving under the layout or in ‘moving’ boxes.
Jim Bernier
I have shelves on the walls by my layout that I display all the trains that I don’t have room on the layout for.