Small project: layout sorting shelves

Every layout faces the challenge in an operating session, of having a place for crews to examine and sort paperwork, especially waybills or car cards. Doing so on the layout surface is not only inelegant and probably in the way, but may put scenic items at risk. More importantly, often there is not enough space to really look at what a crew needs to do. 

One thing that can help is for crews to use clipboards, though this has its own limitations. Clipboards that are full size are cumbersome additions to throttles and anything else being carried, and even a 5 x 8-inch clipboard is not really a convenient object to handle along with running trains. I do have both sizes of clipboards in the layout room, and offer them to crews who want them, but not everyone does.

A few years ago, I picked up on something I saw in a special issue of Model Railroader (entitled How to Operate Your Model Railroad, it was issued in the summer of 2012 and remained available for purchase at Kalmbach for years). In it, they showed a design for a “sorting shelf,” as they termed it, made of hardboard or Masonite. I liked the idea and built two of them for my layout.

Here’s the idea: wedge-shaped back supports and a fairly wide bottom lip allow easy use of the shelf. An overview of the idea is this (from page 27 in that magazine), with a 12-inch wide back. 

Specific dimensions for essentially the same shelf, slightly different from what is shown above, were included in the magazine on page 79; this one is only 10 inches wide, but otherwise much the same. Here it’s called a “rack.”

I looked at this and realized it would be really easy to make. I simply reproduced the above ideas in a simple sketch in my Project Log (a 5 x 8-inch Moleskine book called a “modeling journal” in a previous post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/08/a-modeling-journal.html ). Note that I realized the two wedges could be cut from a single strip of the right width and length. 

This was a really quick project. I glued the parts with carpenter’s glue and clamped them. My shelf is 11 inches wide, thus similar to the ones in the article, though I think that more width would be welcome by those who use the shelves. Below is a completed one, on the fascia at Shumala on my layout. I used the “shields” for the screw heads to avoid the screw slots being a hazard to anyone’s hand. 

The photo above shows a pencil, an uncoupling pick, and a small flashlight on the shelf. My 3.5-inch high waybills fit nicely on this size of shelf, as you can see below. To the left and right of the shelf are “J strips” for holding waybills. I prefer that waybills in use are placed in the J strips instead of leaned against freight cars, simply to preserve the layout visuals.

These have been in place on the layout for some years, and continue to be useful. If I were to do it over, I would just make them bigger. They certainly do what I wanted them to do.

 Tony Thompson