Climing The Walls - Display And Organize Your Train Collection!

Hello again, this is Mike with another episode of Toy Train Tips and Tricks. And in this episode, I'll show you how I organize and display my train collection. When I was a younger lad, fresh out of high school and working my way through college, I would open up the pages of Classic Toy Trains Magazine, and I would see features on these massive collections with huge walls of trains. And of course, imagine that maybe one day I would have something like that. Well, I still don't have anything nearly like what they showed in the magazines, but I have gotten to the point now that I'm older and have a little bit more disposable income. And since prices have been dropping recently, I have acquired quite a bit. And so now I need to find a way to keep it organized. In fact, my lack of organization was causing me some problems with the construction of phase two of the railroad, because that section of the basement was where I had kept all of my boxes for storage because I wasn't using them right now, but now that I'm doing construction over there, I was having to move box from here to here so I could work on here, and then I was finished here and I had to move all the boxes from here back to here so I could work over here and it was just driving me crazy. So I had intended to make this display wall just like this, and that gave me the incentive to get it done so I can get these things out of my way so I can finish construction over there. So let's go through step-by-step what I have done here. You may or may not want to use my construction methods, especially if you don't have a 3D printer, because some of my connections are 3D printed, but you can use other things that inspire you. And you might want to use a different type of shelf system than what I have here, but use this for inspiration for maybe your own design wall, your own focal wall for putting your trains up on display. Okay, so here is my board. This is my second coat of paint drying. This originally was just an open stud wall, and so I wanted to provide something for backing behind the trains and the shelves and the rest of the basement, rather than being drywall, they had put masonite on here, so I decided to match the look of the rest of the walls and just go with a masonite sheet. Quick and easy, other than I had to cut out around a girder up here and some electrical, but otherwise just able to use this straight masonite sheet. Whoever put up this stud wall, this is a non-load bearing wall. They were just trying to put something here to provide a visual block for the stairway back here, and so they really weren't concerned about keeping a steady stud on center, because again, it's not a load bearing wall. So this is rather non-conventional, but it's still going to work for our purposes as long as we screw our shelves into the studs. After this paint dries, we'll come back with our angle brackets, we'll measure and we'll start installing the angle brackets, and then we'll be ready for the shelves and track. After the paint dried, I used my level and measuring tape to mark out the distance for my shelves. Most of the shelves are going to be five inches apart, and then from the top shelf to the ceiling is like six and a half, so things that are particularly tall will go on the top shelf. I also marked where all of the studs are so that I know exactly where I can drill for my angle supports. My shelf supports are these three inch metal corner braces. These come in black, galvanized and brass, and for some reason, the black are cheaper than the others. Screws are included. And this is the same design that I based my 3D printed sleeve on. So these will get screwed in one per each stud per shelf. So I discovered why the black ones were cheaper. They were mismarked. It says it's a four pack, but there's only two in each pack. So that's why they were half the price. Hmm. There we go. I would take them back and complain, but they were half the price for half the product, so I guess that's fair. That does mean I'll have to go back and get more because I calculated based on four per pack. There we go. Make certain that it's as vertical as possible before I put in the second screw. Well, thanks to some of my packages being short, I'm going to have to run out and get some more of these brackets, but you can see what we have going on. So we have a total of seven shelves. All of them are just short of eight feet in length, except for the top two, which have to make room. I've got a girder up here out of the frame of the camera. So that shortens the top two. You can see, as I put these in, I was making sure to level everything. And so we have our brackets and these brackets are not going anywhere. These are more than strong enough to support any shelving that I would put on top of them. And I'd like to pause the video for just a moment and ask that if you're enjoying the video so far, please like it, share it, subscribe to the channel, just let YouTube know that you like this type of content. And you may even consider supporting the channel financially through a membership. Members have access to exclusive video content, early access to regular videos when possible, plus shout outs, special messages, special photos, and other special features. Just click on the membership button at the bottom of the video near the subscribe tab. And whether you are a member, a subscriber, a regular viewer, or just stopping by, thank you for watching the video and thank you for your support. Now back to our video. Now, so what am I going to use for the actual shelving for the trains? Some people like to use wood shelves. Some use the aluminum racks. I am going to use O gauge tubular track. These 30 inch sections from Menards. Not O27, the regular O track is more than strong enough to support being stood upon. And I don't really intend to put hundreds of pounds of weight on any particular section. Um, as you can see, these are quite sturdy enough, especially if I mainly putting on rolling stock and maybe a few light locomotives, I don't intend to put up a wall of die cast steamers or anything like that. And so there's not going to be a whole lot of weight on these pieces. I'm putting a lot more on it now than it's actually going to be sitting on it. So how am I going to attach the track to the brackets? And for that, I have this special 3d printed piece that I've made. This is a sleeve that fits over the end of my bracket. And here is a receiver into which I can snap my O gauge track and that holds everything in there very securely. I'm going to put a copy of this file in Thingiverse for you to download, but be aware that this one is made specifically for this brand of bracket. Other brands, the dimensions might not be quite the same and this might not fit exactly right. So once I have printed enough of these to go on to these, then I can start putting the track on. Also, you can see, ah, there we go. Pop that out to keep the rolling stock from rolling off the end. Another 3d printed piece. I have these track bumpers. This was an 027 track bumper that was on Thingiverse. I modified the file slightly to accommodate the O gauge track. And once it's on there, it is on there. So I don't have to worry about anything rolling off the ends of my track. Also, I won't have to worry about anyone accidentally bumping anything that's on these shelves because at the bottom will be 18 inch wide wire racking that will have boxes and such. So that will keep everyone far enough from the wall that there should be no one accidentally bumping into anything that's on here and knocking it off. So once I get some more brackets, I'll show you how I install my track and we'll go from there. So you can see I'm making some progress on the wall here. And again, I ran out of these Home Depot brackets and didn't get a chance to go back to Home Depot, but I was swung by a Menards and I got their similar brackets. And luckily these are close enough that the sleeves that I've been 3d printing fit just fine over them because every once in a while, if there's a little bit of flashing from the casting, just hit it real quick with a file and it works. Now the holes are in a different position than they were on the Home Depot version. So I'm having to make some adjustments to my, to my marks, but really no big deal. These are working just fine. Now you can see all the tracks and all of the brackets are up. So a couple of things to keep in mind, first of all, if like me, you're dealing with a wall that was prebuilt and the studs are not necessarily even, sometimes you get spots where the track joints don't really match up with a bracket. Now, obviously if you're, if you're building your own stud wall, you can take that into account. So what do you do when you have these track joints out in the middle of nowhere and you want to secure them? Zip ties. Just run a zip tie around the ties, cinch it together, and that will keep the track together as one big piece. Even if you have to sometimes bridge between the long 30 inch pieces and a regular 10 inch piece, as long as there's at least one support under the short piece and at least two supports under the long piece, you can get by all right. The other reason you might want to use these is that even though my custom brackets do hold onto the track snugly, I can understand if you want to be extra secure, and I'm going to be. I'm going to take also a zip tie and run it diagonally up and over my bracket and my bracket sleeve, just over the middle rail, and I will cinch that down to give it some extra support. I don't want to do that on the outer rails because I want things to be able to roll freely, other than of course off the end, which is why I have my pumpers. So my shelves are up, my zip ties are on securing everything. So now what goes on the wall? Well, in my case, it is going to be items that one, don't have their own boxes and two, don't make it to the layout very often, things like a Thomas the Tank set that I have, something like the Kusan Cannonball, some of the cheaper Marks items, things like that will go up here to create more storage space for the other items. Now, again, I don't have to worry about people bumping into this because down below, I have these 18 inch shelves coming out, making this corridor. So it provides a natural path around. So no one is likely to actually bump into this. As far as security, these shelves are good and stable. Now I'm not going to be putting things like diecast scale Hudson's on here. Again, mostly rolling stock and some lighter weight locomotives, things like four wheel Marks, Lionel starter steamers, things like that. These things are going to be secure and on the wall where one, they're not packed away, I can actually see them and enjoy them, but two, it creates more storage space for the other items, as you will see. So this is still a work in progress, but you can see where this is going. And one of the reasons that it's still a work in progress is I'm still printing more of these bumpers to do the other side. So I don't want to fill this in too fully yet until I have enough hardware to protect both ends from rolling off. So the items that are up here, some of them, like I said, are things like four wheel marks that really don't get on the layout very often. And so this is a place where I can see them, but they're, they're out of the way in storage. Some of these are here because they don't have their own boxes yet. These are recent acquisitions. You might recognize the nickel plate set back here. So these are things that I'm still have to acquire some extra boxes for. So what do I mean by acquiring boxes? No, I'm not talking about original boxes. I am talking about this type of storage box, usually by Sterilite. I don't see if this one knows what brand it is, but these shoe type storage boxes are available usually in packs of 10 or 12, and they average out to between $1.25 and $1.50 a piece. They are, um, good and not completely airtight, but, uh, impervious somewhat to moisture, uh, and they provide that protection for the trains and they are stackable. Plus you can, depending on the item, fit two or three in a box here. Like these SP cabooses are small enough. I can fit them three wide. And so as I stack them up to know what I have, I put a label on them. As you see big, bold SP type cabooses, then a list of the specific ones. So when I'm looking for that one particular item, first I keep the stacks vertical by type. So box cars are in a stack, tank cars are in a stack and so on and so on. So I find the stack for the shelf, go down, and then I find the box for the particular item. I try to keep similar items together, but of course, since you're acquiring items all the time, it's not always going to work out that way. Sometimes you're going to have a modern, uh, LTI or late MPC with a post-war car, just because you ran out of storage, but that's okay. So these boxes are a great idea for those two or three cars at a time. And here's another example. This one is by Sterilite. It's got a slightly rounded lid and we have two hoppers in here. And I saved some packing styrofoam to put in between them. So if the cars don't get damaged, bumping into one another. So on my shelves underneath, I have things like accessories. I have things like a container of car loads. It says coal, canisters, pipes, et cetera. We have search lights and street lamps. Halloween scenic accessories. I have another one for Christmas scenic accessories. Things like this are all labeled so that they can be found easily. If we don't have the original crossing gates, flashers, banjo signals, signals in semaphores and so on and so on. Of course you can use other boxes as well. Here we have an old shoe box, Easter scenery and loads pop this open and we have Easter grass. We have eggs and things for when I make an Easter layout. Other boxes, these little corndog boxes. My kids used to love corndogs. These boxes were great. Bridges. So I open this up and here are some girder bridges. So I know where those are. This one says trestle piers. These are graduated trestle set. So any boxes that you can find that you can keep, stack them, label them, put them on shelves so that you know where to find them. This helps you one, not to lose things. And secondly, protects things from getting damaged things and protects things from getting lost. Another thing you can do as you're organizing, make yourself up a spreadsheet so that you can have a list of all those things that you do have. That way, when you go to a show, you go, Oh, do I have one of those? Have the spreadsheet. If you use say Google drive or Google docs, you could pull it up on your phone, your spreadsheet and say, Oh yeah, I already have one of those Lionel 9027 cars. So again, it's a work in progress, but I'm almost there. As soon as I have the rest of these bumpers, I can fill the rest of these shelves, get the items out of the way of construction over there, and I can finally finish phase two. That's alliteration. Finally finished phase. Cool. Now, as I finish it off, I will probably add some more lighting over here. This is a rather dark corridor here. Plus I've also bounced around the idea of maybe adding some led string lights or especially this one. I definitely do intend to do since my bracket clamps are plastic, the track is not touching metal on metal. So I'm considering using one or more of these shelves, add some electricity so that lighted cabooses, passenger cars, searchlight cars can all be in operation while they're on display here on the shelf, just make sure not to put any locomotives on that shelf, or if you do just make sure there it's electrical tape or some other insulator on that center rail before you put the locomotive on the live track and watch it fly off into oblivion. So for now, I'm going to keep the trains going up on display so that later I can get the trains running and I hope you do the same also, and we'll catch you next time with more toy train tips and tricks.