In the summer of 2020 I knocked a hole for the railway to enter the shed to provide storage for keeping trains coupled up and on the rails to get things going more quickly when I wanted to run something. My intention was to create a ‘fiddle yard’ based on the ‘cassette’ system often used in smaller scales, but owing to space 16mm scale takes (and the fact my converted pig sty is not a big shed!) I decided to have the cassettes stored vertically, effectively as a set of shelves.
But it was the summer of 2021 before I got round to this, since once I’d got a couple of yards of track under cover, I lost the motivation to take things further. Even just having one train ready to go makes a huge difference.
I did finally get round to bringing the line round the corner and making my train shelves (as recorded in a virtual meet-up post). The cassette system is a space saver and also a money saver – no need to shell out £50 for a pair of points for each storage siding…
Trains sit on aluminium angle gauged at 32mm of course, I printed a flap to sit between them, this firmly locates the cassette with the approach road…
…but when it folds back so you can remove the cassette, it acts as a buffer stop, preventing trains from diving onto the workbench.
And on the cassette side of things I’ve printed these pegs that slot into a hole to stop unbraked trains sliding off if I don’t manage to keep the shelves perfectly horizontal as I lift them.
The shelf brackets are deep enough to have two cassettes on each level. Of course, getting to the one at the back means a bit of shifting around, so a total of 4 cassettes on three shelves is probably the practical maximum.
The weak link is, of course, the shelves themselves – they’re wooden (decking board) and some have already warped… in a damp shed there’s no guarantee they’ll keep their shape. I had considered trying to construct them entirely out of aluminium but that seemed like a lot of designing and manufacturing so I went ahead with these as a proof of concept, and they’re still usable 3 years later. Really they also need side rails, which should be easy enough when I’ve decided how best to implement them, and ideally handles so that the centre of gravity is much lower than the point from which one lifts the shelf… but I might put building another couple of shelves higher up my priority list, as it’s already proving very handy to be able to keep trains railed up during the summer months.
