From the Dome Car: Train 11 Track 3 (January 2002)

 

Remember hobby shops? Time was every major city had more than one. Winnipeg, where I live, had five at one time. Now only one remains, having opened up a few years ago. (Thanks, Frog and Diamond!) In this Dome Car, I take a nostalgic journey to some of the hobby shops that meant a lot to me as I got started in the hobby. This includes the time I spent $50 to buy a locomotive and five or six pieces of rolling stock. Talk about days gone by! 

The closing of Hall's Hobby House in Dallas, Texas in December got me thinking about how people get started in model railroading. 

For me, Hall's was the place where I returned to the hobby, after an absence of ten years. 

Like many model railroaders my age (I'm 45), I got my start in the hobby with the proverbial Lionel train set. That was followed by a hand-me-down Triang set, which was followed by HO scale and, finally, by N scale. That N scale layout was sold to help finance my university education when I was 19; it was ten years before I set foot in a hobby shop again. 

And when I did, it was at Bobbye Hall's. It was back in 1986, and I was living in Dallas while my wife studied. As a Canadian, I couldn't work there, so I volunteered in the community. In 1987, just before we returned home to Canada, a friend gave me $50 as a parting gift. I promptly went into Hall's and bought a locomotive and five or six freight cars. (You could do that back then!) I've never looked back. 

Since that time, I've had a warm place in my heart for Hall's, which was one of the oldest hobby shops in North America (founded in 1946). 

When I returned to Dallas two years ago, after an absence of many years, that store was one of the first places I went to, lingering near the glass cases, the shelves lined with kits and the well-stocked magazine rack, recalling those days in the 1980s when looking at trains was all I could afford to do. 

Hall's was not the first hobby shop I'd been in, though. Before returning to the hobby, I spent many Saturdays as a child at Niagara Central Hobbies in St. Catharines, Ont., my face pressed up against the glass around the shop's little layout (which still exists, in the store's new location). 

Luckily, business takes me to St. Catharines several times a year, so I get to stop by and check out the place. There are always some neat specials and lots of used items as well as all the new arrivals. I'm almost never disappointed. 

But Niagara Central wasn't the first place I went looking for trains. That honour goes to the local Kresge's (now K-Mart). I suspect that I, like most of us, got our start in the hobby with department store train sets—models with greater fidelity to prototype, can motors and scale wheels would have to wait a few years until we grew up and found, and could afford, the finer and better side of the hobby. 

And when we started looking for those better-running locomotives and rolling stock or add-on parts and things, where did we go? To our local hobby shop, of course. 

For me, that tradition hasn't changed a bit. I’m lucky to live in a city with five hobby shops, including Elmwood Hobby Works and Ware House Hobbies—two of the finer stores in Canada. 

I mention all this because people come into the hobby of model railroading from different places. Many of us start as children with department store train sets. But when it comes time to be serious about the hobby, we find help at our local hobby shop. 

Which leads me to this final thought: Support your local hobby shop! Sure, you can often buy stuff cheaper from U.S. discounters, but you can't hang out at a mail-order or on-line store on a Saturday morning, shooting the breeze with your friends and trouble-shooting a recalcitrant locomotive or looking for gremlins in your DCC system. For that, you need a hobby shop. 

Here at CRM, we are pleased to support hobby shops across the country, and to promote department store train sets, too. However people come into this great hobby doesn't matter to us—just as long as they come in! And with that, we extend our best wishes to everyone in this New Year and we'll catch you in the next issue.