Yesterday's Airlines Mk3

Following the cat-astrophe Yesterday's Airlines has been reborn again. If Mk1 encompasses the many iterations of the original hobby room and Mk2 was the new house hangar then Mk3 is the first time that the majority of the collection has been gotten behind glass into display cabinets. Hopefully from here it'll be protected and kept free of dust. With the collection approaching 1300 units it has come just in time and after a few weeks of uncertainty I can get back to blog posts and box opening.

So in this post I'd like to look at the new layout of the hangar space. Here is what it looked like before so you can compare to the earlier layout - Yesterday's Airlines: Back and Better than Ever

The new medium sized cabinets measure roughly 1m wide by about 85cm high and 45cm deep. The 5 units in use now occupy the area above the cupboards (which house the model boxes). I have tried to keep roughly the same layout as before, which means that each of the cabinets has 4 levels - that is except for the middle cabinet. This cabinet has only 3 glass shelves (due to a paucity of glass) but having no back I have been able to keep some of the old wood shelf units and slip 2 extra levels in. It also provides handy access to the electrical point which allows the internal lights to turn on. Below is the new layout of this space:

The major changes to the previous layout are the collapsing of the UK independents onto 1 shelf and movement of the ex-Warsaw Pact nations onto the larger Aeroflot shelf. There is more room for the Africans, who have expanded in recent months, and the Mexico section gets to more approprately live next to the Central American / Caribbean area. the Canadians have also rejoined the main area so as to protect them from wayward sports equipment - see below. Here are photos of the individual cases:

As you can see there is still a bit of space in the cabinets for expansion - though I'm yet to add in the 70 or so models I acquired recently. Things are looking a little tight on the Oceania and UK shelves.

The US half of the collection has also gone through some major changes. Only the large MDF unit is now open and contains only 7 of the Trunks. The most important addition has been another large glass cabinet that matches the smaller units. It has an impressive 7 shelves.

I also acquired a few weeks ago a wooden glass fronted unit, which though a bit dark does the job and has been topped by another small glass unit, which now contains Braniff.

Lastly my first glass cabinet has been reorganised. With the local service airlines moved to the new tall cabinet United and Delta in the 90s can join the rest of the 80s and 90s fleets:

All this behind glass protection isn't just to keep the cats and dust out. The garage now has a lot more foot traffic, as when you are tired of staring at the aircraft you can stop off for a game of pool too! If you find yourself over in West Auckland give me a shout and we can organise a game :)

An added and unexpected bonus has been the lighting in the cabinets which looks pretty great. So in the end I guess I owe the cat a favour for pushing me into this reorganisation, though it'll take years to replace the broken models I guess its a fair trade off.