Techniques to Organize Your Equipment

Summary: Organizing your equipment can make it much easier to find particular items when you need them the most. This will save you both time and effort you can spend elsewhere.

Finding reliable equipment is one of the most important aspects of any job, because it will help you do your work that much better and in less time. When shopping for equipment for your train and carrier cars you should look for the items that will give you the best value for the price and will not break down easily. The kind of pieces you buy is important, but when you are working with large quantities of items on a regular basis, from a portable power supply to wrenches needed to tighten and loosen parts on the train during maintenance, how you choose to organize everything is also an area you and your team cannot choose to ignore.

Setting up an organizational system that everyone can follow might not seem like an urgent matter but the quicker a system is put in place, the sooner you and the people you work with can save both time and energy looking for tools you might need at a given time.

Sort by Purpose

One grouping method that you could use that can be easy to follow is to group items by purpose. If there are some pieces of equipment that are mainly used to perform maintenance on a locomotive, for example, then it would be wise to have them all in one area that is easy to access. If you were to have everything in a big pile, it could be time-consuming to hunt for that one tool you or someone on your team needs.

Sort by Kind

When you are done using something and need to return it, there will be little to no confusion on where it belongs. Manufacturers like Start Pac have even colored their power units by battery type to make it even easier to determine where similar items go, at a glance. Keeping all of your batteries in one spot, tires and chains in one spot, and tools like shovels and hammers in another spot will make it easier for anyone to figure out where to place or find something.

If you have a lot of track components, for instance, you might want to take your organizational efforts a step further. If you have drywall screws that come in different sizes or you have many small parts that are easy to lose track of, then dividing them up by size would be helpful. Shelves and small bins can keep these small items in order.