Model Trains Back on Track Again : Holiday Standby Is Highballing Into Hearts of Young, Old
Allen Drucker measures the appeal of model trains he sells by counting the smudge marks on his front window.
In the window of his Allied Model Trains store in West Los Angeles is a large layout of his hot-selling German-made LGB trains. Fourteen hours a day, seven days a week during the Christmas season, the engine--which is about the size of a loaf of bread--pulls two cars and a caboose. It emerges again and again, headlight glowing, from a long tunnel nestled against a wall.
A Little Forgotten
“You come here at midnight on a Saturday and people from the restaurants will be pressed up against the window,” he said. “It makes me wish someone would invent smudge-proof glass.”
Perhaps a little forgotten in a toy market dominated by dolls that come with their own adoption papers and robots that change into cars, model trains will nevertheless chug around many Christmas trees again this year, highballing into the hearts of both children and adults.
“Generally, the average kid today does not ask for a train for Christmas,” Drucker said. Usually, it is a parent who will bring the youngster into the store and talk him (or increasingly, her) into wanting a train set, he said.
Although the usual explanation for this phenomenon is that the parent really wants to play with the train, Drucker said the seemingly endless expandability of train sets is a big reason why parents are so keen on buying them for children. “People will buy a train for their children or grandchildren and say ‘I’ve got birthdays and Christmases taken care of for the next 10 years,’ ” he said.
In the 1940s and early ‘50s, millions of parents were doing just that. Then came the long decline of model railroading. Drucker has a theory on what went wrong.
He thinks the 1957 launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union triggered a slump in the sales of model trains that lasted nearly 20 years. “The whole world went crazy with technology, jets and rockets and that kind of thing,” he said.
Then, about a decade ago, “Old things began becoming popular,” he theorized. Prices increased for old Lionel, American Flyer and other old trains that had been going to Goodwill or in the trash. “It got to a fever pitch four or five years ago” and has remained steady since then, he said.
For the last several years, an increasing percentage of model train buyers have purchased the LGB, whose initials stand for Lehmann Gross Bahn or Lehmann Big Train. At 1/32 scale, it is much larger than the HO (1/87) or N (1/160) scale trains that have been popular for a number of years.
Drucker said that one of the LGB’s strongest selling points is that even the most ham-handed hobbyist can put together a layout of trains, tracks and accessories.
“We get a lot of upscale professionals,” he said. “They are very good at what they do. But with mechanical things they are often klutzes. They are so amazed when they can put this together.”
The LGB is also reliable, he said. The trains in his window run 60 to 70 hours a week year-round and can go a year before needing a new motor. “We put them around the (Christmas) trees at Wells Fargo Banks,” he said. “They just let them run and run.”
Drucker’s upscale customers show an affinity for European trains, a taste that appears to have developed over the last decade. In the mid-’70s, Drucker said he cut the prices of his European-style trains in half, but still found few takers.
Today, they seem to sell better than American trains. “I think what happened, especially on the Westside, is that a lot of people have been to Europe,” he said. Many Americans, he guesses, have ridden on European passenger trains, but never on an American one.
He also caters to high-tech model railroaders. One such piece of equipment is the Pacific Fast Mail Sound System II. Thirty-two knobs and switches control a triple tape deck, replicating not just the chug-chug-chug of a steam locomotive, but also the more esoteric sounds of the blower, generator and couplings. It costs about $1,000.
It is the sort of thing, Drucker said, that the beginner should not be railroaded into. “If he’s never had a toy train before, we don’t want to sell him this,” he said. “It’s important not to sell the beginning hobbyist anything too exotic.”
It is in a model railroading shop’s interest for its customers to be happy with their equipment, Drucker said. Satisfied customers are likely to be buying accessories for years--perhaps decades--to come.
“People like to come in each year, get a new car or some more track,” he said. Although his shop does 30% of its annual sales during December, Drucker said expansion-minded customers may make January the shop’s busiest month in terms of foot traffic.
Some hobbyists plan a grand layout, but never follow through. “What happens is that a lot of times this stuff just stacks up,” he said. “Some people have the equivalent of a hobby shop in their garages.”
A large LGB layout is out of the question for people who live in small apartments or condominiums, Drucker said. For them, there are 1/220 Z scale layouts.
“As more and more people live in smaller and smaller places, they are going to want to keep up the hobby,” he said.
An elaborate Z scale layout sits to one side of the front door to his shop. It features a bridge, two tunnels, a mountain, nine buildings, a half-dozen cars and trucks and dozens of trees and bushes. The $650 layout measures 2 feet by 3 feet.
The tiny trains are of high quality, but “they can be very temperamental,” Drucker said. “You have to work on them with a jeweler’s loupe.” A starter set is about $110, or half of what a basic LGB set costs.
Fred Hill doesn’t have any space problems with his shop’s LGB layout. It runs on a moderate-sized loop during business hours, but does not take up even a square inch of floor space. His answer: to run the LGB overhead on a Plexiglas layout suspended from the ceiling.
Hill, owner of the Original Whistle Stop in Pasadena, sells a variety of HO scale trains and accessories.
While his shop has a number of expensive hand-crafted locomotives, he does not hesitate to recommend one of his least expensive products.
“Athearn of Compton is the best HO train for the money,” he said. “It’s also 100% American and a lot of our customers like that.
“It is a very precise piece of machinery,” he said. “Over the course of 20 years, we haven’t found one we couldn’t repair.”
The Athearn HO trains are all post-World War II diesel-style, which Hill said appeals to young people. “When kids think of a train today, they think of Amtrak,” he said. “That’s what they want.”
A starter set runs about $55, including a locomotive, two cars, a caboose, a power system and an oval track. But that is rarely the end of it.
“The first thing they get is more track, then switches, then buildings and cars. Then the empire begins.”
Hill’s own empire is built of the more expensive and collectible brass HO scale locomotives. His cluttered office has display cases on all four walls. Each case contains several shelves full of glimmering model steam locomotives. He estimates their combined value at $80,000.
For the more affluent buyer, brass HO locomotives have an irresistible appeal, Hill said.
In HO scale, an engine may run from $125 to $1,800, depending on the piece’s popularity, craftsmanship and rarity. Hill said brass offers “exact scale fidelity,” meaning that each part can be exactly 1/87 scale on an HO model.
“Look at these hand rails,” he said, pointing to one brass engine. “You couldn’t make them that fine in plastic. They’d break.”
He said that brass model trains first became popular after the Korean War when American soldiers in Japan began asking underemployed Japanese silversmiths to build them scale models of American locomotives from pictures. Today, South Korea makes many of the inexpensive brass locomotives, while Japan makes the most expensive and detailed ones, Hill said.
He estimates that only about half of the brass locomotives he sells end up running on a layout. About 30% wind up in display cases like the ones in his office. The other 20% stay in their boxes, unused.
People who don’t unpack their brass trains probably bought them as an investment, Hill said, noting that some brass locomotives will appreciate in value slowly, while others will increase 25% to 30% in a year.
“In what other hobby can you buy a fine piece of equipment, play with it for five or six years, sell it and make money on the deal?” he said.
Hill considers Ten Shodo of Japan to be “the Mercedes-Benz of brass.” On a long wall display of brass locomotives in his shop, Hill singles out a 1943 Southern Pacific Cab Forward locomotive. It is black with a silver band on the front part of the cowling. He estimates that it has 800 separate parts.
The price tag on the 10-inch-long model is $1,500. Hill thinks it’s a bargain.
“It is all handmade by the old silversmiths,” he said. “There is no assembly line. There were maybe two men who made this model.”
Only 50 were made. “When it is sold out, it will automatically go up to $2,000,” he predicted.
Gary Keck has a lot of old trains at The Train Shack in Burbank that have appreciated to many times their original selling price. In the case of Lionel products, the appreciation was unexpected, Keck said, noting that few, if any, buyers of Lionel trains since the company’s founding in 1900 bought them to beef up their investment portfolios.
Keck said that his Lionel customers shop for either price or quality, buying bare-bones sets or top-of-the-line models. He said that most of the new Lionel sets he sells are priced between $95 and $250.
