How Many Of You In The Past Sold Trains As A Business .....

scale rail posted:

What did you do professionally in the hobby.

Don

For Bachmann I designed the whistle and horn circuits for their HO line.

For Right of Way Industries I designed digital sound systems, the 400 watt transformer, and the 3 color signals.

For Train America Studios I designed the UCUB circuits from Mike Reagan's idea.  We also did a lot of OEM designs for many companies.  

I still design circuits for the model companies.  

Lou N

Lou, that was one great transformer. Don

scale rail posted:

Lou, that was one great transformer. Don

Thank you Don.

Not to overlook your original topic, so  much of the design work involved being a salesman and answering technical questions all day at York.  Always had a pen and pad handy for drawing out circuits.

Lou N

I never had a business myself in the hobby, but I worked for Chris Gains at Nicholas Smith a couple of Christmas seasons and I help Lou Caponi of Loco Louie's at York a few times.

Working the counter is an eye opening experience. It gives one a whole different prospective of the hobby. 

What I really enjoyed about it was hearing all the behind the scenes stories of the business side.

Helping the customers was fun but my main job at NS was keeping the show case glass clean. 

I had a hobby and craft store back in the 70s in Sioux City. Learned a lot about the fickleness of customers. Mail order a loco, pay the postage, have to wait especially if backordered. I had the darn loco. Same price as the mail order and the freight. The two best days of the business, the day I bought it and then the day I sold it. No regrets.

Dick

Don,

I thought more about Selling professionally and the lessons learned.  I offer you the following and hope it doesn't bore you.

I worked at Hobby House and one Friday during the Christmas season (1970) I had a very drunk customer with a dirty white shirt and crumpled fedora come up to me and say that he never had a train as a child and he wanted the best I had.  I wrapped up an eighty dollar set and he paid me with gas station money he pulled from his sock.  I told the boss that there would be a return on this set when the guy sobered up and saw what he did.  Saturday came and went.  The next Friday in walks that customer, sober, clean white shirt, straightened hat and he says to me, I want to buy some switches and boxcars for the set you sold me last week.

During the post holiday months Hobby House was active with radio control planes and cars.  This was expensive stuff and I had a high end customer that was into RC race cars.  John Carey was always impeccably dressed; he was a haberdasher at Bunce Brothers on Shaker Square.   And always with a long thin cigar.  One day he came in with a leather jacket (instead of the usual suit) with assorted patches on it.  I asked what they were for; he said that those were all of the European Road Races he had been in.  I must have looked at him funny because I never heard of a black race car driver.  The next day I hear this noisy rumble coming down the street and I look out front and there's a cream colored Lotus Elite, no side windows (or heater).  Out steps John, opens the shop door and says: hey kid, get your coat.  We're going for a ride.

At York at the TAS booth in the Yellow Hall we, like everyone else, had a stack of catalogs.  There were marked $5.  Nobody ever charged for catalogs.  I had a fellow point to the price and I said take one.  I handed him the catalog and he thanked me in sign.  I asked if he was hearing impaired; he was.  We had a nice "conversation" and then he pressed on.  Twenty minutes later he came back with three of his friends, all hearing impaired.  We had a wonderful "chat".  After they left I realized that here are 4 guys among 15,000 and finally someone new to talk to.

Lou N

I sell lots of die cast (in all scales, about $500K/year)  and had ordered some MTH DDA40X's from a friends hobby/toy store.   Their store closed a year later, but I still wanted my engines, so I became a "dealer" to keep my order alive.   (I did get them about 4 years later)......This lasted for about 10 years until the place I was working at decided to sell off/sell out and scale way back.  I'm thinking of getting back into it again....   

My father and I were Dohertys Trains he  had a hobby shop for about 25 years I sold at train shows and ran the internet. I really enjoyed doing train shows I loved the interaction with people and giving people a hard time :-)  Like a lot of people selling trains as a business it killed my love of the hobby, now I restore motorcycles as a hobby.

By the way I will buy or trade  trains  for that old bike or quad with a blown motor or trans sitting in your garage.

Three years ago I was asked by my neighbor to take on the task of selling off a train collection for an estate he was charged with liquidating. Since then it's been a little side business. Depending on the type of collection and how I'm contracted, I'll attend local train shows to sell, photograph and pack for internet sales, or sometimes just consult and suggest an auction house or appropriate resellers (there's still comfort found by some in dealing with brick and mortar retailers)

It's interesting to get a close up look, and learn a bit about, some of the trains and eras I usually don't concentrate on. The major hurdle I ask clients to get over, it's a requirement actually, is to not expect there's a fortune to be made because it says "Lionel" on the bottom. 

Tim

I owned Tim's Toy Trains in Colorado for almost 5 years. I took over from a previous store, Hanks Model Trains, when the original owner was retiring. I learned a lot about the hobby, about running a business, about people and about myself. One thing is I will never walk into a big box store with my old mind set. Now I look all that inventory and think of all the invoices that need to be paid. I think of the rent, the utility bills and I have a new found respect for any entity that can maintain any kind of retail store. After I shut down and joined the masses again with a "9 to 5" job I can relate to the bosses when they say they can't afford to do this or that, I know the feeling. I was always around $25k in the hole, always. I had customers that were self employed say that was normal. I had a friend of mine that owned a printing business and he was always $250k in the hole. I think the big box stores are always $2.5mil in the hole.

The other main thing I learned was I will never do it again. I used to joke with my regular customers that working in a toy train store was great, running a business sucks! I really only want to be the stock boy, not the CEO or especially the accountant.

Tim

I had a retail hobby shop back in 1989 north of New Orleans that featured a large RC racetrack and we flew RC aircraft. Sometime in the first year a fella came in one Saturday asking to open a Lionel Service Station. We became friends and next thing I know - I'm up to my chin in trains!  

Having had American Flyer as a boy, I was completely unfamiliar with Lionel and their numbering system. I became a dealer for Williams and Weaver and settled on Mikes Train House as my best distributor for Lionel. When he formed MTH, I was able to be a MTH dealer as well. 

George, my service man still operates Lionel Service Station No. 224 in that area and is a fine repair man, doing a good business there as 'Uncle Sam's Trains'.

Here are two of our business cards from the time.

TimDude posted:

I owned Tim's Toy Trains in Colorado for almost 5 years. I took over from a previous store, Hanks Model Trains, when the original owner was retiring. I learned a lot about the hobby, about running a business, about people and about myself. One thing is I will never walk into a big box store with my old mind set. Now I look all that inventory and think of all the invoices that need to be paid. I think of the rent, the utility bills and I have a new found respect for any entity that can maintain any kind of retail store. After I shut down and joined the masses again with a "9 to 5" job I can relate to the bosses when they say they can't afford to do this or that, I know the feeling. I was always around $25k in the hole, always. I had customers that were self employed say that was normal. I had a friend of mine that owned a printing business and he was always $250k in the hole. I think the big box stores are always $2.5mil in the hole.

The other main thing I learned was I will never do it again. I used to joke with my regular customers that working in a toy train store was great, running a business sucks! I really only want to be the stock boy, not the CEO or especially the accountant.

Tim

You said it for sure. No one will ever know. It really has made me sour to many people. Them telling me how it is and what I should do, when they've never done anything  in their lives.  And they love it when your struggling. Just love it. But it's fun to **** them off when things do start to climb!  I had 22k per month in heavy equipment payments at one time. That's just to the bank. Then you have to put fuel, insurance, parts, people etc in them. 11 men to keep moving. STRESS!!!  It almost killed me. I had shingles and high blood pressure when I was 27. Yes 27.  Handled lots of money but made very little.

I'm still in business but have learned better ways and am smaller. I'm still clearing out some debt but we're way more profitable because of changes made by learning the hard way. I still don't have tons of cash I can burn on trains, but it's getting closer.

Everyone should try it once! Until then I have trouble stomaching comments on how to run a business from those who have never done it. And although it still has challenges, many who have been handed a business and has Dad's money behind them will never know the real deal from scratch. They are not in the same league. Not to pick on them, just making a truthful statement. Sorry I'm so one sided on this, I obviously feel very strongly about this subject.

I was partner in a hobby shop that was mostly car stuff but I ran the train dept. This was 80's and 90's.  I sold my part when my real job got bigger. Shop closed a few years later when my old partner passed. But Charlotte NC has ZERO hobby shops now.....gotta be the biggest city in the USA w/o any shops so somewhat a hobby wasteland IMHO.