TrinityJayOne
N gauge fan
With my joining a club recently it's become increasingly obvious that moving all my rolling stock to & from individual jewel cases every week is a massive pain in the arse. As you may be aware it seems that people who design carry cases for model trains only bother with HO. I did find an ebay seller in the UK who was selling some nice foam tray inserts for N, but he didn't seem eager to combine shipping when I asked for a quote (read: he didn't respond at all 
). So I thought 'bugger it, I'll make some myself!' and got in touch with a local foam supplier. I went down there that day with a picture of what the ebayer was selling, told them I wanted something similar and gave some dimensions. I was quoted about $13-something each for 20 trays, or $8.50 each if I just took the cut pieces and assembled them myself. I went with the DIY option.
A week later I picked up 21 (they had a spare) 400x400mm foam bases, a few hundred foam strips of varying lengths & widths to go around the edges of the base and create the inner walls, and some offcut pieces to be used as spacers between cars. The strips had an adhesive already attached onto them, so all I had to do was peel off the protecting film and push the piece down onto the base. Very simple to do, took me no more than 5mins to build a single tray. The foam is quite soft though and can't really support the weight of trains unaided, so here we move on to stage 2 of the project.
This afternoon I visited Bunnings (Australian version of Home Depot) and got some plywood and pine cut to size for constructing some 'drawers' for the foam trays to sit in. 7mm plywood base, 12mm pine around the edges, again very simple stuff that took no more than 10mins to assemble. I've only bothered to assemble 2 trays + drawers so far but I think the results speak for themselves-
The foam is soft enough to hold a boxcar in place without damaging anything and will also deform to hold bigger items like hi-cubes. I'm not going to bother with the spacers and instead use them to hold in smaller cars as necessary, such as flatcars or ballast hoppers. Eventually I'm going to build a small cabinet that 5 or so drawers can slot into for easy portability rather than carry them around individually.
Hopefully this gives people ideas on how easily storage can be attained if you're willing to do a bit of construction yourself.
). So I thought 'bugger it, I'll make some myself!' and got in touch with a local foam supplier. I went down there that day with a picture of what the ebayer was selling, told them I wanted something similar and gave some dimensions. I was quoted about $13-something each for 20 trays, or $8.50 each if I just took the cut pieces and assembled them myself. I went with the DIY option.A week later I picked up 21 (they had a spare) 400x400mm foam bases, a few hundred foam strips of varying lengths & widths to go around the edges of the base and create the inner walls, and some offcut pieces to be used as spacers between cars. The strips had an adhesive already attached onto them, so all I had to do was peel off the protecting film and push the piece down onto the base. Very simple to do, took me no more than 5mins to build a single tray. The foam is quite soft though and can't really support the weight of trains unaided, so here we move on to stage 2 of the project.
This afternoon I visited Bunnings (Australian version of Home Depot) and got some plywood and pine cut to size for constructing some 'drawers' for the foam trays to sit in. 7mm plywood base, 12mm pine around the edges, again very simple stuff that took no more than 10mins to assemble. I've only bothered to assemble 2 trays + drawers so far but I think the results speak for themselves-
The foam is soft enough to hold a boxcar in place without damaging anything and will also deform to hold bigger items like hi-cubes. I'm not going to bother with the spacers and instead use them to hold in smaller cars as necessary, such as flatcars or ballast hoppers. Eventually I'm going to build a small cabinet that 5 or so drawers can slot into for easy portability rather than carry them around individually.
Hopefully this gives people ideas on how easily storage can be attained if you're willing to do a bit of construction yourself.
