The Caffeinated Engine Driver

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while might remember that when I started building Jerusalem I went through a few track plans and a badly built baseboard before I settled on a simple rectangle of MDF and a straightforward oval with a siding. One thing I didn't consider at all was long term storage. As a result Jerusalem is now quickly attracting dust. I'll probably have to build it a box as I've so far failed to find anything that it will fit in. I did order a box, but due to a slight miscalculation Jerusalem turned out to be about 1cm too long to fit and I'm not about to hack into the layout to make it fit. The moral of this story is of course to think about storage before building the layout, and so...

I've started work on designing a new layout. So far I have a general theme and a few track plan ideas floating around in my head, but the only concrete thing I have is somewhere to store it. What I've bought is a 77 Litre Really Useful Box, with insert trays; although when I opened the parcel today the trays are missing about which they were very apologetic and replacements should be on the way. According to the website the internal measurements of the box are 1135mm long, 232mm wide, and 285mm tall.

This box is technically designed for storing a fake Christmas tree along with the baubles and lights, but I'm hopping that I can use the storage trays to hold the running stock, controllers etc. above the layout. If this all works, then not only will I have a great storage solution, but it should make the layout easily portable. At least that's the plan and only time will tell how well it works out.