Train storage & basement upgrades ... | June 2026 WHATS NEAT

on the June 2026 what's neat. >> Before you can even build a layout, how about room preparation? I've discovered there's some things that I hadn't necessarily thought about that I've given thought to since December. Whereas things have changed and the room buildout itself is going to be as interesting as the layout. I mean, that's what I want to talk about tonight on what's neat. This is fun. This is like you're just hanging out down here with us for a few minutes. Oh, the the smell, the aroma of that white smoke. Oh my god, that brings childhood memories. That brings home some memories from December. Here we go. Watch this. Two of them. The What's Neat Show is sponsored by Lombard Hobbies, [music] your value hobby shop for over 40 years of modelers helping modelers. Big inventory, value [music] pricing, fast shipping, and great service. and by Broadway Limited Imports, the cutting edge [music] leader in model trains. Check out their website at broadway-limited.com. And by Bachmann Trains. Now that's the way to run a railroad. Check out their website at bachmantrains.com. And thank you for helping us support [music] the best hobby in the world. This is What's Neat for June 2026. I'm your host, Ken Patterson. And again, tonight we are going to have a fun show. We're going to shoot this show this evening all in one take if I can get it right. I've been practicing for a few days on this because there's a lot of things I want to talk about on this show, including something that we don't talk about ever in any of my what's needed videos that I've ever produced. And that is before you can even build a layout, how about room preparation? And I want to talk a little bit about that tonight because I've discovered there's some things that I hadn't necessarily thought about that I've given thought to since a period of time now since December. Whereas things have changed and the room buildout itself is going to be as interesting as the layout with regards to animation and the features that we can incorporate into the ceiling and various parts of the room. And that's what I want to talk about tonight on what's neat. Also, we are going to get the layout running for the first time. Actually, we got the layout running about uh four or five minutes ago for the very first time. And we have these beautiful Broadway Limited steam engines that I just received. And these are the gorgeous Bull Moose model, Union Pacific. And I've got pre-war 1944 and postwar 1944 models this evening to show. But let's start with 3553 which as I recall this would be the post war model with it's got all the eccentric pumps on it. And I will show you outdoor photography in this of this in a minute. Let's just see if the layout runs. I've got the digit track system set up that was uh set up the night of December 13th. And guess what? It still works. Rock and roll. And I've got a different power supply on it. A simple 3 amp power supply that puts out 15 volts, which is what I want. And the power supply has got a circuit breaker built into it. So, when I have a short, um, I didn't plan on doing this, but when I have a short, the circuit breaker inside the power supply shuts down, shutting down everything. So, I really like that concept. That works for me. So, what I want to do now is power up the steam locomotive. And hope we can do this in one take, right? And my cameraman told me just now I put this on the wrong track. And why is that? Because this is the first time we've run the layout. Only one track's clean. And let me get this right. Hey, look at that. The circuit breaker works. How about that? How about that? That's a test. Okay, I've got this. Okay, I believe There you go. We got smoke in it, too, Derek. So, give me a good background shot of this puppy woman. Isn't that wonderful? This is right out of the box. I shot them outside a few days ago, and I'm going to talk about that in a minute, but I don't want to talk over the sound. Here. [screaming] Let's put the other one on, Dirk. Let's put them both on. This is fun. This is like you're just hanging out down here with us for a few minutes. Oh, the the smell, the aroma of that white smoke. Oh my god, that brings childhood memories. That brings home memories from December. Here we go. Watch this. Two of them. All right. Oh my god. Get back and shoot that. [sighs] lights, right? Look at that number lights. [snorts] [screaming] Okay, the layout runs. I've already killed the power and it took him a few seconds to turn off. So, obviously, these models also have the uh what Soundtracks calls a current keeper installed in them. Here's the boxes they came in. And again, I'm going to go over the details and show you the outdoor photography that I've got of these beautiful Union Pacific locomotives, 2880 Bull Moose. Now, the first one I'm showing you is 3514 shot in outdoor sunlight. This is the post 1944 appearance. This is a really cool model. It seems that it's underneath the uh running boards. You're going to see the difference. I mean, look at the difference on these two when you see them. I've got this shot of them both side by side right here of the front number board placement. Look at the cowling on the front differentiation between the two. I've also got side shots of all these I'm going to show you too. The next one is 3553 to 8880 Bull Moose S6 locomotive. This is the pre-1944 uh appearance of this model. And again, hats off to Broadway Limited. Just beautiful models. You've seen them run here for the first time, just like I did on the layout. Literally, for the second time in the last 10 minutes, we've gotten this thing running. I now have a point to point. So, that's cool. The next thing I want to talk about tonight, and I think this is going to be good. Um there's there's I talked about the layout room preparation and that's huge but that got me thinking about the display cases. I've taken all the ones down that were here in the layout room and I want to talk about the various things that is transportation train displays and train storage. Okay. And the way I want to do this I've got uh first of all I'm going to talk about transportation. And I've got some cases on the workbench here. When I belong to the Midwest Valley Modelers Layout Club, that club layout that I started uh back in 1988, I bought these cases from a gentleman in California that had a case company called Classy Case Company. And at the time, I was spending upwards of $280 to $350. This is back in 19 uh '89, 1991, '94 through those years that I bought various cases from this gentleman. And I had them custom made to hold Amtrak trains, the double deck cars, stack trains. I had one made for stack trains that was the right length for a five well car set. This would be super easy to make yourself if you can find the latching hardware. It's nothing but literally 8 inch Luon plywood, quarter inch wood with some nice handles and hardware on it. And believe you me when I say it, these things I've filled them with brass models. They literally probably weighed 30 lbs of brass models and they did very well for me through years. And I've got a lot of different, like I said, sizes of these. And this is one way to go about it. You can use your imagination if you're good with shop tools. It's super easy to come up with a concept and create your own travel case for your club layout. Here's a smaller one that I like. This is probably the first one I ever bought. And I bought this one from the Great American Train Store. That's how I actually discovered this company probably. We're going way back. We're going back to 19 probably 80 87 when that store was [clears throat] around. This was a small one that they had actually in a store. And I bought this and it hold a couple engines. But what I really like about this case, and I use this one literally every month. Every month because I'll throw trains in it like I did this one for the podcast we shot last week where we shared these uh beautiful tanks and some rapo models on the last podcast. I literally just took these outside in this case, did my photo shoot, and brought them back in. I mean, the other option, how are you going to carry a steam engine? The other option is to do it like this very carefully. And when you're shooting 12 models, there's no time for that. So, this is a neat, viable option for transportation. Of course, they work good for storage, too. They'll fit in a closet, but that's not why I bought them. Another company that we discovered, I think last year, about 6 months ago, this guy's out of Australia. He's got a website, modelrainbox.com. I've seen a couple different sizes of boxes from this gentleman and nscale. This is a new one that just came out on the market, in fact, this month, I think. And I've got a Bachmann car here with tons of fire extinguisher dust on it still. But this case is made specifically for passenger cars. It looks like it holds 11. So, that's kind of neat. Um, the problem with most train cases is you get two cars in and you get to the third section of the case, it's not long enough for a third car. So, that's how you alleviate that. That's a good idea. This would be for storage, but this would also be for transportation to your club, right? I think in one video we shot last year, last summer. Look at it. You can see the fire extinguisher dust on this, too. Sorry, it's not all cleaned up yet down here. This is a case for the trains are stored long ways. You pull out the dividers and you can fit your trains right in there. And you don't have to pull out all the dividers if you don't have that many to travel with. Just pull out one or two or three, whatever you need. This will hold a big boy. This will hold a long locomotive and two passenger cars end to end. Um, I want to make sure I'm right about that part. Let's check this car in this box real quick and check. Um, but yeah, I'm not even going to say a word. Let's just see one. Uh, no. So, I can fit one passenger car in here or three multiple freight cars. But the fact is it's still I'm glad we know that this is a passenger car right here. You can check these out on the website modeltrainbox.com. He's got these stateside. I hear them ready to ship. But it's one other option. And let me see what else do I have on my notes here real quick. We're talking about train transportation and we have covered all of it. Next is train displays. Now, the very first train display I built was when I was in high school, and it was built out of need. And uh, by the way, I worked at a hardware store in high school, so I had access to tools. And I had a my first Black & Decker router, the old orange one. And I put a 1 inch 1/8 inch bit in that. And I was able to cut a groove into a piece of wood, which got me started thinking. I run back to the glass department, buy a bunch of pieces of glass made, say about 12 inches high, maybe 18 inches long, and all of a sudden, I'm building my own train case in my bedroom actually in this house, uh, back in, gee whiz, 1983, probably 82, maybe 81. Anyway, long story short, I don't have that many pictures of this case, but here's the case, and it was very topheavy with all the glass, but they did slide, and I could put trains in it. I built a layout underneath the train case part and then underneath that was a bookcase which had substantial weight on it which is what kept that thing from falling forward onto my bed when I was sleeping. I later took this train case and I mounted it on the basement wall when I started building my third layout when I was just about to graduate from high school. And I I'll show you a picture of the layout real quick in the room. Same blue theme, same basement. And then here's the train case hanging on the wall with all my old AN engines at the time. Old blue box stuff. It's all we could get back then. Um, and then as we move forward, you can go to swap meets and find these train cases. They're usually made of wood. They're not glass sliders. And I was buying these for 75 bucks a piece. And this again, I'm going back to 19 94 is when I loaded up on about six or seven of these. And I had them in my shop walls down here all across the walls loaded with a lot of my brass collection that I collected at the time. Right now, here's one of them right now with the type of freight car loads that you really don't want exposed. You don't use them that much and you don't want them damaged. And this case really works good from that. You could build these yourself any size you want. Another case that works really well. And if you can follow me over here, Mr. cameraman, we forgot to set up our lights, so we're going to shoot this in the dark. This is the same type of case that you would get at a swap meet. You probably find these online or again build it yourself. This is for Ncale, but I have found it useful for holding the vehicles that I would use in all of my photo shoots. Another way to display your trains, and this is one that I really like. I went to a furniture store here in town back when my first wife and I met, and we were living in an apartment together, and I literally worked at a small table in my apartment. And that's where the concept of the uh Midwest Valley modelers layout was born was at that table. But what it was was I went to the furniture store and bought this china cabinet. It was missing its bottom, but the top part was lit. It had really thick glass in it. It was a really beautiful piece of furniture and I put it on top of a coffee table and that was my case for displaying brass. That's really if you're going to do it in a living situation, not a layout room, not where you're dedicating a space, but you just want a small space up in your home in the upstairs living area to display some of your most favorite prized models. I really suggest that's the route to go. the china cabinet with the doors that open up. You smell that smell, you know, you get off of work, I remember this and looking into my brass case and looking through the models and I've been working so hard to, you know, have and enjoy and that was neat for me. Now, as I built this studio and started working in this home full-time, that's when I came up with the concept of the large shelves for display that you've seen that were in the background here in the studio. Uh, I've obviously taken all of those down, but I want to discuss the concept of these shelves because this worked good for me for almost 20 years. This is 2 by 12s. All right, the simple house dimensional lumber. It's dirt cheap. You router it, you curve it, you paint it, you stain it any color you want. I built these at the time that I was working with Bachmann and Gscale was all the rage. It was just going gang busters. Gcale this, Gscale that. And so before I knew it, I had like 35 large scale engines down here and they don't fit. They don't look good on the floor. There's no way to store them. And so that's why I built these shelves. I literally built, you know, x amount of boxes wrapping around the wall like you've seen on the podcast stage set for years. Whereas I probably had linear feet of 40 to 50 feet of lineal feet of storage space for trains. And so here's a G-scale train right there. In fact, this is the very first Gcale train I shot for Bachmann. The whole point is because they fit G-scale doesn't mean they fit books. They don't. They don't fit DVDs. They don't even fit VHS tapes. They're just a little too short. So functionality for anything else than trains. The way I designed them, that's all you're going to get. When I built these after I was, you know, I had a son, had kids, and all of a sudden what I did was, and I told you, Durk, I was going to put these in live. What I discovered on these shelves was if I built 1x4 steps, it would enable me to steer Hot Wheels. At the time I was buying my son, he was four or five years old. Hot Wheels, Johnny Lightning cars. I was turned on by the Johnny Lightning detail. So, I built these shelves to hold Johnny Lightning cars on the train shelves. Um, it was neat. And on the lower shelves, I had 1/8 scale card. It's a diecast stuff you get from Sam's. And my son used to play with those that kept his hands off of the detailed models that were further up. So I've literally got photographs of hundreds of these Johnny Lightning cars on multiple shelves all lit up. And it was such a hassle to have to dust those cars all the time. So I got over that my fed of Johnny Lightning. But I came to discover that these shelves hold scale models perfectly. You've seen that on the show. I'm going to do that for you right here. They hold HO scale models, three rows, and in fact, I'm always able to store two rows on the top back shelf. If you're not in an earthquake zone, this works. Earthquake zone, you got a cascade of trains falling on the floor. This is bad. But it's simply 1x4s straight across and then another 1x4 cut into 2/3. So, it just raises up just a little bit. It was just enough to clear clear Hot Wheels, the double deck Hot Wheels, the taller Hot Wheels, but again, it fits trains. So, that's how I came up with the concept of these shelves, and they literally changed over time as my use for them changed. [clears throat] Now, you're going to ask me probably, why, if I had such a great concept of shelves, did I take them all down? Well, two reasons. One, we want to redesign these shelves the way they are for the trains, but the lower sections of of the shelves that sit around where the podcast table and the stage set is for our weekly show that we do, we're going to put the sound table and things like that underneath. We're going to make it fit underneath so we're not married to one table. But another thing I want to talk about is this. Right after that fire, I spent four or five weeks sealing everything, making sure that the fire smell would not permeate into the residence in any way. In fact, these beams, I actually washed them and sanded these rafters down before I sprayed them white. Overkill, but sometimes I do that. What I'm getting at is this. On a wonderful day in March, I came totling into the basement and as I walked in and you know, of course, everything's sealed. I smelled smoke. I got a tinge of that smell and I was like, "Okay, how can that be?" Upon taking all of these shelf units off of the wall, this wall over here, for example, lookie lookie. I don't know how it does it, but that sneaky smoke got right behind all the shelves. So, I've got to wash this wall down. Look at that. That's That's uh That's foam, baby. I know, right? Yum yum. Anyway, the whole point is I didn't know this was behind the shelves. There was no way to know because they were all plywooded over. They were tight. They were screwed to the wall tight. But somehow that permeated and it does stink. So, this wall's got to be treated, and I think that's going to do it uh with regards to getting the smell out of here. Something else we want to talk about tonight. You know, we talked about on the May video how I'm going to build a city here. Well, lookie lookie what's in the city right now. We have got a train set from Bachmann Industries in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This is a representation of the 1976 American Freedom Train. I saw it here in St. Louis down at the Arch. So, they got the GS4 locomotive on the front. This is nondcc. This is a simple DC model. Comes with a loop track. I think it's 41 by 80 something inch loop track power pack system. But what's cool about this obviously is a freedom train. And on the actual prototype freedom frame, you had the display cars that were displaying various items in American history that were relevant to our history. And so Bachman's modeled these cars as per the prototype, all new die work with the Liberty Bell inside, a Model T, all kinds of cool stuff inside these cars. And then on the end, you've got the observation for the American Freedom Train. Comes as a train set. Check it out at the Bachmann website and you can also find this at Lombard Hobbies. Thank you very much, guys, for helping us support the show. So, there's one more thing I think we're going to talk about and let me grab my notes on this. Dirk, thank you very much for helping me tonight. Um, we talked about storage. There's one more thing about storage that we have not talked about. We've talked about my big shelves. We've talked about Oh, this is great. We've talked about just the train cases and how wonderful those are for transportation. How do you store your freight cars? Okay, I've shown you my locomotives are always on a shelf. You could also store locomotives this way. I would suggest you look into architectural drawing drawers. I had three years of that in school and I saw a lot of architectural drawing drawers. Also, if you check Husky and the various hardware stores, Husky, for example, sold at the Home Depot. If you check those drawer sets, they do. And you can buy drawers where they're made the right depths we want. Super expensive. You might spend 700 on a set of drawers, but if it saves your $1,000 trains, you know, here's what I did. At one time, I built a set of shelves. Here's one right here. I would say these are drawers. And I use the drawer slides, the same ones that I showed on the What's Need video in 2014 when I showed the Thomas layout and my daughter was sitting in the drawer. These drawers will hold 150 lbs of weight. You're not going to break them. And look, they hold freight cars. Um, yeah, I know, right? Um, but the fact is they're smooth. They come and go. You can put your 30 trains in one. You can put your modern consists in another, a reefer train in one. I'm not going to open all these, but illustrate the fact that these are smooth flowing. The cars stand up straight. And look, there's no fire extinguisher dust on these. And I did not clean this drawer out. That's That's true. That's actually a new discovery. Anyway, that's because these drawers have been taped shut until about 20 minutes ago. We've had them all taped shut since the fire. So, I've got another set here. This set used to be on top of that. So, it was much higher. It was a complete set of 11 drawers, which if you figure a drawer that's 4 foot wide, 2 feet deep, you're looking at almost 2 and 1/2 sheets of plywood of lay flat space that you could store your trains. Um, here's a reefer train. Santa Fe reefers and PF reefers. These things are better than 30 years old from Inner Mountain. But the fact is they're safe. If I want to go to a train show or a club, I'd throw these into my black case and take them to the show and they'd be totally safe. That's pretty much I want to talk about something else now that I've just shown you. If you'll remember in May's video, I got you back by the switchyard back there and we were looking at why did I build a switchyard with only six tracks in it? And I said, well, you know, at the time I didn't have very many trains. And I said, well, I don't have very many trains now. You just looked in the drawers. How ridiculous did that sound? What I meant to convey to you was at the time that I built this layout and it was a run by layout, simply a display layout to run trains on. I had six tracks in the switchyard because I only had six consists. Not see that's the difference between talking about how many trains do you have, how many consists do you have. I had a 1980s train, a 1940s train. what I thought was a 40 train at the time. Um, an Amtrak train, a small stack train, and a short co cold train. So, that took up all of my tracks. So, as I would add a train or another train, I'd have to pull those off the yard, which meant I had to build these drawers to store everything in. So, that's something I wanted to talk about on that. I think we've covered it all, jerk. We got train cases. We're doing this live. You want to talk about the layout prep room area? The reason that nothing's gotten done here, I built a small workspace here. I'm going to build a countertop here. In fact, it's experimentally laid out. I've never had an area for the 3D printer before. It never was in my vocabulary until 2015 December when we did a video on the Dremel. So, here's a 3D printer sitting back here for I don't know, three years. Haven't even James Gear did something with it once. I think my son came here off of college and printed something. But now I've got a dedicated space here where I'm going to have a computer set up. Keep all the electronic stuff for our show and things and cabinets back here. This used to be the wall where I shoot photos. Layout prep includes building workspaces which will be very close to the layout and easy to work with. I'm not going to just drop in cold blank all the way across the ceiling of drop ceiling. In other words, ceiling tiles. I'm not going to do that. And the reason why was the very last few months that we had the Midwest Valley Modelers layout in an apartment at Kirkwood right before we moved out, I had balanced that entire layout. So in other words, right over the layout here in the room where it's going to go, I think I would have dropped valances down about yay high down right 18 in. I'll put my blue sky, my lights up into that. And then on the outside of the valances, I'm going to paint it black and just have black space. Okay. And then the cabinets will be white. And we come over to the switchyard over here where it's going to be double deck switchyard as I discussed in last month's video. We'll put a valance there, too. We don't have to have pictures on the wall no more. I don't want to see the same covers for the last 35 years hanging on the wall. Check out the smoke lines around where those pictures were hanging dark. You know what? That smoke is some nasty stuff. But the fact is, that's one part of layout prep that I want to talk about. Do you want to drywall your layout room? Do you want to paint your basement walls with waterproof paint? Do you want to mount your layout to your walls or have it be freestanding? That all dictates whether you have drywall exterior walls, studs, or you're drilling into the stone or the concrete to mount your layout on the walls. Do you want hardwood floors? Do you want carpet? I have had carpet down here for 30 years. I really like the cement painted brown because we can roll the studio equipment around. We can roll the tools around. Nothing hangs up on carpet and it's a lot easier to clean. We'll see about that as we get the ceiling put in. Some of these areas will be drywalled. Like for example, where the layout's going to be, that area is going to be drywalled. The valance would come down. The drop ceiling would be three or four inches lower than that, giving you room to access the tiles. Any any wiring for future changes in wiring. Last thing I want to talk about, and this would be kind of cool. Follow me into the shop. This is fun. I don't need notes for this. How many times have you seen videos where I've talked about making roads, and I've showed you that uh DAP cement mix that I like to use [clears throat] all the time? Well, here's one of the roads that we made in that video. As you looked back there, you saw the layout is no longer here. It is in the backyard. I'll show you a video clip of that real quick. It's a pile of foam in the backyard. That's the entire layout. That's the river. That's all of it. Back inside we go. Here's this cement road. Check this out. I know Joe, you're going to want this for a thumbnail. Let me give Dirk some space here. You're not going to believe this is cement, right, guys? This is the same. This This was This video was made in 2017 or 14 on how to make cement roads. This is literally the cement. Um I don't think the foam is giving me a lot of structure, but as you can see, it's it's very flexible. This is incredible. This is why it doesn't crack on your layout when we use it. So, that I think is going to cover everything on this video that I want to cover. What's neat for June 2026? It's really difficult to keep production going filming when I'm not building actively layouts and things scenery related other than pulling out maybe the endscale layout and doing something with that. But as this room gets further prepped and things change to the point where we're going to actually have more than a pointto-oint layout running down here. I mean, this is huge. The trains run now. I've got a pointto-oint layout. That's a start. So, let's see what happens next. So, with that, we're going to end this uh June 2026 What's Neat. Best hobby in the world, guys. That's [applause] it. Thank you, Derek. All the products seen on this episode of What's Neat are available from Lombard Hobbies in Lombard, Illinois, or order online at lombard.com. Broadway Limited Imports, the cutting edge leader in model trains. [music] Check out their website at broadway-limited.com. Bachmann Trains. Now that's the [music] way to run a railroad. Check out their website at bachmantrains.com. >> [music] [music] >> Heat. Heat. [music] >> [music]