I worked as a salesman in the Lionel and LGB section of Allied Model Trains from late November 1990 to mid March 1995. It saddens me to see Allied close, because it was the most beautiful train store I’ve ever seen.
You can criticize its owner Allen Drucker all you want for refusing to sell toy trains for less than the Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price (MSRP). Keep in mind that Allied was one of the largest toy trains stores in the world, and it was expensive to operate on that scale. We sold all scales and manufacturers. Customers came from everywhere, not only Southern California. Allied was only three miles from LAX, so many people dropped in on their way to or from the airport.
I began working at Allied on the Friday after Thanksgiving in 1990. We began work at 9:30 a.m., cleaning glass counters and re-stocking merchandise. The door opened at 10 a.m. On my first day, I sold $1,100 of LGB trains to my first customer within the first 15 minutes. I don’t recall how many LGB Christmas train sets I sold that year (at $399 each), but I probably averaged six or seven a day until Christmas. Of course, I sold a lot of Lionel and other LGB merchandise, too.
Celebrity customers stopped by to see me all the time, but what I enjoyed most of all was waiting on ordinary people who, like myself, were fascinated by toy trains.
One of my favorite sales was to a woman in her 40s who had always wanted her own Lionel train. Her parents never bought her one when she was little because she was a girl. I sold her a vintage Lionel locomotive and a few cars from the late 1940s and early 1950s, including an operating milk car, enough track to go around her Christmas tree and even have a passing siding, and a vintage Lionel transformer. After her first visit, she stopped by several times that Christmas season wit