It all started when I was browsing through my family pictures from my mother's hard drive, and I stumbled upon four pictures that my father took of me in front of Wild Bill's train layout.
Now, as my experience with Wild Bill's Trains goes, it was located on Groesbeck Highway in Clinton Township, just outside Downtown Mt. Clemens and south off from 16 Mile Road. My dad and I were once-in-a-while customers, just to see their massive train inventory and train layout. What really stood out to me was their inventory of old train catalogs they had in the back of the store. The downside was that it wasn't as big as Whistle Stop and Great Lakes, and the owner wasn't too keen on running the train layout anyway. (Either he was crabby, or that he didn't want to waste the power. I'll never know for sure.)
Regardless, the items my dad bought for me were a Lionel Central of Georgia boxcar and an ACL hopper to go with the Southern GP-38 diesel I received for Christmas 2005 and the Southern caboose and searchlight car from the Lionel Visitor's Center, a Lionel Chesapeake & Ohio 0-4-0 switcher engine (glad Lionel has been catching up on those), a Lionel 1990 Vol. 2 catalog (the Circus set was worth gazing at), and TM's Lionel Nation 4 DVD.
As my family and I moved around the Metro Detroit area over the years and found three extra train store to visit (Empire Hobbies, Troy, MI; Carlton Hobbies, White Lake, MI; P&D Hobbies, Fraser, MI), we sadly more or less forgot about Wild Bill's Trains up to the point that I read the store went out of business. As much as I felt sad inside, Empire Hobbies as I knew would also be another victim of the online shopping trend. (I'm part of said trend, too.)
But, all is not lost. I have these four photographs here for you to see, and I have the link to their website on Internet Archive. I hope you enjoy.
(https://web.archive.org/web/20...wildbillstrains.com/)
