I mean really… Its been years since I have seen real HO or Lionel train sets sold at toy stores or Wal-Marts. At Christmass they usally have some cheap plastic G gauge trainset for around the tree but in order to get quility I have to go to a Hobby Shop. Tyco and Bachman made trainsets that were at least of some marketible quility. Tyco had some neat accesorys such as dump cars and my favorite the slot car/train set. Toy stores used to have whole model train sections. Now one is lucky to find a dusty train set on a bottom rack.
Last Christmas the Wal-Mart by me had an Athrean train set for sale, the price was $40.
Bert
Ah yes you must member the 50s when what you described was a reality. Retailers are in biz to sell goods that will sell & sorry to say since the advent of electronics which sell they push electonics as they have long since taken over kids interests. Try to find a erector set today as well just as another example of what electronics have done to what you may “preceive” as normal kids interests such as electric trains. The bottom line which is also what the retailers look at is the majority of kids have zero interest in electric trains which is why they are not on the shelves which is the sad reality of todays world.
…Sadly for the interested fan, it’s been too long. Only outlet I notice in normal activity are the special catalogs I recieve occasionally. Years ago as a youngster receiving those model railroad catalogs was a high point around the holidays.
I have to lay some of the blame at our class one’s themselves…The business they perform tends to be standoffish, and “stay out of my way” attitude so as the public has tended to put RR’s out of their mind…
I tend to think that has “helped” the demise of the popularity of the hobby.
Last Christmas Wal-Mart had some kind of John Deere train set.
I have seen a few HO sets at my local Toys R Us and then one or two Lifelike sets at Target during the Holiday season. It is nothing like I remember as a kid in the early 1960’s. The Jordan Marsh store in Downtown Boston had a large display of Lionel & American Flyer along with a layout. Lechmere Sales in Cambridge always had a large selection of Lionel, HO and later N scale sets.
Progess there is no stopping it!
Regards
If you want to see a toy train set in non-traditional outlet try Hobby Lobby and Menard’s.
Menard’s and Hobby Lobby sell Lionel Train Sets during the Christmas season.
I have yet to go into the Wal-Mart store to see what they have.
The Portage, MI location of Wal-Mart on Shaver Road.
This is the stretch of Shaver Road where the Norfolk Southern runs parallel for a few miles.
That was a former New York Central line that connected Kalamzoo to Elkhart.
With new traffic routing, the number of trains on the NS line from Elkhart to Kalamazoo has greatly increased.
Andrew
The Deere set came three in the case along with a single COCA-COLA set. Of course the CC set sold first. We still have a few Deere sets left at our store in Danville the last time I looked.
And we also had a set with a 0-6-0 steam locomotive. All HO.
When I was a little kin (in the early 1990’s) KB Toy Stores used to have a whole section of Bachman HO trains. The quality was good for $3 per car. Those days are long over though.
Yep our local Wal-Mart had them last year. In the central Arkansas area it was reported to me that several Wal-Marts did not have HO scale train sets, but, amazingly, the Wal-Mart that is less than a mile from my train store and the Wal-Mart that is one-half mile from my competitor’s store had them on the shelf last Christmas.
OK, ya’ll can call me paranoid if ya want…I’ve got more proof of how Wal-Mart operates (they were asleep in business class when the topic about having competition was healthy)…was tempted to post on that other thread again except that one got a little off topic.
Oops, I gotta go. Here at the epicenter of Wal-Mart Nation it’s illegal to say anything negative in public about the Company. The black vans are pulling into my parking lot. It was nice knowing you guys.
Dispensa’s Castle of Toys, in OakBrook Terrace, IL, (literally, it was a building with a castle facade on it, way cool) had all kinds of trains, year 'round.
In fact, they had another long lost hobby item. War Games…I mean, games like Squad Leader, and Submarine, Flattop, Panzer Leader… you know, all of the Avalon Hill Games… yeah, you can find war games out there, but not like it used to be…
Unfortunately, Dispensa’s went out of business, and now there is a sky scraper in it’s place. [:(]
That place rocked! The amusment park next door was great to me as a kid.
Bert
Here in VT they still sell train sets at Toys R Us year round. They have a couple of different life-Like sets in HO for sale, and from the lack of dust on them (I don’t think they would bother to take time to keep them dust-free) I assume they sell regularly. Wal-Mart seems to get them occasionally, but no sense to when they have theem or not.
Marc
The amusement park was great… Kiddie Kingdom… my little sister loved it. It’s one of those “one-of-a-kind” places that made for great memories. I just wish my kids could have seen it… I beleive it closed about 1984 or so, because that sky scraper has been there since about 1989 or something.
I see the train sets all the time at the hobby shop here in Duluth. But there the newer trains sets from athearn Gensis and Bachmann Spectrum. I haven’t seen the older bachmann, Tyco, and even the life like trains sets for quite a few years. I see them in the Walthers catalog but not in any store. Atleast I have not looked in any store.
James
Last year, Xmas, Sav-on had Life-Like HO sets for $20. Sam’s Club had the killer deal, Bachmann G scale set, with the latest (very good) generation locomotive for about $120.
Here in , the real Canadian Superstore and its little brother Extra Foods have an annual HO set out for Christmas. Last year it was a CN Bullet Nose Betty along with some weird themed freight cars. The loco’s are generally quite good (so I have heard) and I would get one if it had one I was interested in (ie CP that looke OK. The CN unit last year looked very nice).
Life-like at last check was not very high quelity
Agreed, I would rather pick up the El Cheepo KB toystore G scale set. At least I can blow-up that for some very good kitbashing parts ( I do large scale BTW) [;)]