Over this weekend and yesterday afternoon, I worked just about full time to replace these eight shelves . . .
. . . with the eight shelves shown in the photo below, which are located in the same place. I did this because . . .
The old shelves were 25 3/4 inch long. The new shelves are 29 1/2 inch long, or just 3 3/4 inch longer: that 3 3/4 inch is every last mm that I could squeeze out of that wall: I am using the studs in the wall as the sides of this shelf assembly now.
Three and three-quarters inch might not seem like much - in total I added only two and a half feet of shelf space (three and three quarters inch times eight shelves). But a shelf that is too short might as well not exist. And while I had a total of one hundred and twelve feet of shelves reserved for display of scale steamers, I had five steamers - very handsome steamers I might add - that I could not fit on my display shelves, but had to store under the layout, out of sight. I had too many short shelves.
This problem came to a head when I got the new MTH Premier Union Pacific FEF-3 last week. It is a stunningly beautiful loco that I want on display when not running it, but I realized it was going to be the sixth loco going down under the layout when not running - or something else, like a Mallet, or Legacy NYC Mohawk, or a Premier NYC Niagara, would have to go instead. I could not let that happen!
Before jumping in, I studied whether the additional three plus inches I could get with all this work would really help. I was shocked at the result. The histogram below shows the shelf needs (length plus half an inch or so) of my forty-eight scale steam locomotives. Fully forty percent fall into a length category where they fit on the new shelves but not the old. There are just a lot of O-gauge steam locos - at least those I buy - that fall into this range of length. I went from not being able to fit all of them on 112 feet of shelves to having lots of flexibility about where I place them, and room for a few more big steamers, on 115 feet of shelves.
So while it was a lot of work, it was well worth the effort.
F
