Since we have a thread lamenting the demise of the local hobby shop, I thought I’d start one with a more positive tone where we’d share our fondest LHS memories.
One of mine is when I was a little kid way back in 1987, my dad would take me to watch the trains run around the LHS’s layout in Centereach, NY.
Another is when my Dad took me to the late Eastern Hobbies in Rocky Point, NY and bought me a an HO Model Power 0-4-0 like this one as a reward for a good report card in 1993.
I have lots of hobby shop memories, but nothing specific I can put my finger on. I was going to hobby shops since I was a kid too. Quite a long time back, in the mid 1950’s. It was a lot safer for kids then. I used to ride my bike a couple of miles to visit them and see what was new and ‘neat’. I was building plastic models back then. About 7 or so years later I started building wood airplanes. Gas Control Line planes first, then later into Radio Control planes. When I went into the Navy, every place I was stationed I would look up all the hobby shops to see what they had and what they specialized in. A lot of fond memories there.
My first LHS, back when I was a young boy in the 1950s, was a place called Hobbyrama in Rockville Centre, NY. It was a small hobby shop, and I used it both for trains and slot cars. Much of the old rolling stock I’ve still got on my layout was bought there. I grew up and left, and my Mom moved away from there, and I have no idea what happened to that shop. A quick search by name or by hobbies as a business brings up nothing in that town.
I also liked it when my Dad would let us stop at Mulraney’s Trainland, a huge Lionel store in nearby Lynbrook. They had a jaw-dropping in-store layout. Even after I’d switched from Lionel to HO, I still liked to stop there. Mulraney’s has survived and even thrived, being part of Trainworld/Trainland in New York. They still have the retail store.
Going to Dundee Hobbies in Surrey Place Mall. Allinone Hobbies in Delta on Scott Road. The Hobby shop in Guildford Mall, can’t remember it’s name.
Taking the bus to New Westminster to Creative Hobbycrafts (AKA 3 Floors Hobby Shop). These are the ones with train items I remember.
There were others that were for mostly scale plastic models, one on 96th and 128th in a strip mall in Surrey and another in a strip mall on King George Highway and 104th Ave where Safeway is now.
Nothing special except the hours spent at 3 floors…
I remember Creative Hobbies in New Westminster. I was there a couple of years ago and had a great Saturday morning chat with some real old geezer train guys. They were counting rivets on the new Trueline Train Cabooses that had just come out. Waldorf and Statler had nothing on these guys. Even though I love trains, part of me hopes I never know as much as them. [(-D] I think it is still there isn’t it? I remember going there with Mom as a kid, it was a long way from North Vancouver, so didn’t get there often, but loved it when we did.
It was North Shore Hobbies for me. Early on I went with Dad for train stuff and Meccano. Then Strombecker slot cars. Lots of plastic models and then gas powered model airplane stuff. It was five miles down hill all the way on my Mustang bike. Carrying half a gallon of Mistlemist airplane fuel home on the bike, uphill all the way, proved a challenge on occasion.
I went to that hobby store the same way I stop in at Home Depot now, I always needed something.[(-D]
I remember creaky wood floors and everything a twelve year old boy could ever want. I purchased plastic models, model rockets, R/C cars, D&D books, and other essentials for a bored kid in the summer. Though I ‘played with trains’ when I was that age, everything was given to me from my Uncle’s layout. I never needed to purchase anything train related.
I didn’t set foot in that place for over ten years. Ironically, when I returned to the hobby five years ago, they closed their doors two months later. I guess I was a little too late to help them out. Now the Internet is my hobby shop, with a little assistance from Hobby lobby and Michaels.
We had a hobby shop in Davis California where I spent nearly all of my teen years. The hobby shop there was in a strip mall next to an Albertson’s grocery store. They had a decent amount of HO stuff considering what was available back then, which was mostly Athearn in terms of HO rolling stock. I bought some SP Daylight painted passenger cars and a Daylight painted F7 - which was the best running HO diesel I had at the time. The “holy” SP SD45 that I wanted so much and got for Christmas didn’t run all that well for some reason.
Later, between 1977 and 1981 while I was in college at Sacramento State University, I found 3 shops in Sacramento that were pretty decent.
One was in the Arden Fair shopping mall which had the “Vanishing Vista’s” post card pictures (which I still have!) of the D&RGW and many other RR’s, as well as glass cases with Brass.
-There was another shop in the Market Place shopping center with some nice N-scale stuff, which is where I bought my Paasche air brush, which I still have.
-Finally, and best of all, there was the Whistle Stop hobby shop on Marconi Avenue in Sacramento, which had an entire wall of glass cases with brass, gorgeous, and lots of stuff.
When I was a little boy around 8 is a wild guess I remember looking several times at a Varney 0-4-0. in a hobby shop window. There is not much that I remember that far back but this is something that has stuck with me and undoubtly was a starter of my model railroading intrest.
My favorite place to go from about age 6 to I moved away at age 34 was Arlington Hobby Crafters in Virginia. As soon as you walked in on the left was the train counter. I am sure my buddies and I annoyed the clerks to no end in our teen years asking to see this blue box or roundhouse kit, seeing if we had enough money to get a car and then asking question after question. They never treated us badly or told us to go away and for that I was always grateful.
Once we reached about 18 years old the actually let us go behind the counter and pick what we wanted to look at which was a great thrill for us. We all became friends with the owner, Mrs Fisher, who invited us to her house to see her train collection which put us all to shame with its size.
Now the nearest LHS is over two hours away and I do most of my shopping on the Internet. My how times have changed.
Do you mean Arlington Virginia? There is a shop down on just off of 95 and 7100 (Fairfax Co Pkwy) which is decent. Thats the only shop I’m aware of the the Northern VA area worth walking into. I found a shop in Manassas and one in Chantilly but they have very little HO stuff.
Ah, Trainland - as a kid my parents took me to Trainland (late 1970s) to set-up my first layout - HO scale. There may have been Lionel in the store, but I don’t recall it. I do recall that great store front window layout (HO scale), with a mountain as the centerpiece (I recall what was probably a Brawa ski-lift on the East side - it was not that easy to view the layout from the inside of the store).
Later on, as a teen in the early 1980s, I brought quite a lot of Bachmann Plasticville buildings from there, along with Lifelike/Bachmann/IHC/Atlas track and cars etc. (Heck, I think you could even find Bachmann and LiftLike rolling stock at stores like Woolworths in the early 1980s).
They completely remodeled the store, I guess late 1980s, early 1990s? No more grand layout (just a small product display layout, O, HO, and N all together). I have been there often since, the latest about a month ago to get some paint - they are solely discounters, and I have often overheard them sending people looking for detail parts etc off to Willis Hobbies in Mineola.The West and South outer walls of the shop are indeed loaded with Lionel and American Flyer stuff, but there’s HO/N stock in the middle.
Funkiest Hobby shop by far, the old Red Caboose in Manhattan of the late 1980s, the 4th floor store (as you progressed away from the windows it got mustier and darker and creepier). They eventually moved across the street into the site of a basement hobby shop (which I remember being better than the Red Caboose at the time, but that’s neither here nor there), and as you can see from their Website they hav
I remember my first hobby shop as a kid. I was about 8 years old and my parents were changing my layout from Flyer to HO scale. I remember getting the track and some Athern kits. It was great!! There was another hobby store not too far from my home in St. Louis called Tinker Town. We visited that place a few times. I remember all of the brass engines that they had but really did not “understand” what brass was all about. Thirty years later, I was doing my residency at Washington University School of Medicine and visited Tinker Town. I bought my first piece of brass (that I still own). It was a NWSL N&W W2 2-8-0. I had it custom painted. It still runs great!![tup]
For me my fondest memories would be the hobby shop that was located in the basement of Frank P.Halls in Columbus,Oh ran by a Mr.Charles (Charlie) Lewis…This was the place to be on Saturday morning since that’s when Charlie would reveal the newest brass and Athearn cars and locomotives.I never forget the time when I first saw Athearn’s SW7,GP35 and the massive SD45. Brass diesels from Alco,Hallmark and Trains Inc seem to arrive every two weeks.The faithful would make the weekly trip to check out the new goodies,buy modeling supplies and talk shop and it seem everybody knew everybody name.
I recall seeing Alco Models RS1 and wanted one.I ask Charlie to hold one till next week…I still believe that was the longest week of my teenage years.I went in the following Saturday and bought the engine for $34.95 plus tax.I ended up buying five more.
Nearly every one of my significant mrr milestones involved a hobbyshop.
The first was when I was 12yrs old in Farmington, MI, and waiting in the checkout line at the LHS to pay for something not train-related. That’s when I saw MR and RMC magazines on the rack and started thumbing thru them. I bought the August 1966 RMC which got me started on my mrr addiction.
The next was 5 years later when I discovered Pro Custom Hobbies in Catonsville, MD. I was amazed at the amount and variety of stuff they had. I would meet all my mrr friends there on Saturday mornings and go railfanning afterwards. Within that year I enlisted in the Navy and drifted away from the hobby.
15 years later I again found myself in downtown Catonsville with a few hours to kill, while my wife was having lunch with some of her friends. I noticed that Pro Custom had moved to a new location across the street from their original place. I went in and looked around, and noticed that there was a lot of cool new stuff on the mrr market. I realized at this moment I once again had disposable income - and bought a few items that started my return to this great hobby.
Hi Brent, Creative Hobbies closed down at least 3 years ago now. There was another one that opened around the corning in the old Pacific Scale Rail but it closed two years ago, Shamryn Hobbies.
It was the mid-1960s and I was bit by the model railroad bug pretty bad, after receiving an Athearn HO train set for Christmas. Back in those days, a 12 yr old kid could safely be trusted to take a city bus downtown - in Minneapolis- where the Gagers Hobby Store wad located. It might have been 10 degrees above zero, but I quickly warmed up as I entered the store. Brass imports were on display on shelves in glass wall cabinets, there was all sorts of parts, paint and those old Tru-Scale wood tie-and-roadbed pieces where you inserted the rails yourself. And… lots of Athearn BBs on store shelves. That is where I bought my first BB kit- a Southern Pacific flatcar with stakes. My allowance was derived from shoveling walkways in the neighborhood, so I wanted to save some for the next trip, as snowfalls were not scheduled events. Nothing beat the feeling of taking the bus back home with that kit in a bag, nothing! (at least back then as a kid). That memory is still so fresh, I found a duplicate Athearn BB of the same kit just a few years ago at a swap meet. I still haven’t built it, but you never know, it might just snow here in Florida! Cedarwoodron
I grew up on the northwest side of Chicago, and went to Lane Tech HS (class Jan 62). Across the street from it - on Western Avenue - was B&E Hobbies. This was the first real hobby shop I ever saw. To the best of my recall, it was essentially a double storefront with one side trains and the other side was cars and planes.
They were Lionel authorized dealers, but the biggest portion of the MR side of the store was scale trains - HO and O. Even as a typical “hard guy” teen, I was in awe of the place. Never before had I seen so much room dedicated to trains - and the huge variety of “stuff”.
There were a couple of young guys working there - probably 16 years old or so - and I thought they must have the greatest job in the world.
I’ve been to a lot of hobby shops all over the country since then, and the only one that really brought back those teenage feelings of “awe and wonder” was Bobbye Hall’s in Dallas.
I visited Tinker Town 3 or 4 times in St. Louis in the 1990’s when I flew there for work over a couple of years time. It was not a big place but a nice shop and as you said, they had some nice brass stuff - particularly I was impress with D&RGW brass which I seldom saw in the north east. I picked up some Eel River 61’ PC&F “beer” box cars there which I still have, and a set of Walthers custom painted Athearn SP 57’ mechanical reefers, which I still have.
I have heard Tinker Town closed? Is that true? and when did they close?
