Breathe
All Aboard! Model railroading is an enduring Christmas tradition on Long Island
Photos by Jeremy Garretson
For those who care about such things, the model train display at the Long Island Railroad Museum in Riverhead can be counted among the rare treasures of the not-so-modern world. The 40-foot long by 16-foot wide layout features 12 working locomotives pulling close to 100 railcars across nearly 1,000 feet of track—the scale model equivalent of nine-plus miles.
There are 87 working accessories—from crossing gates and barrel loaders to parking garages and heliports—all of which can be operated by museum visitors with the simple press of a button.
Walking around the display—or “board” in model railroading parlance—which is housed in the museum’s visitors center on Griffing Avenue, truly is a trip back in time. And for good reason.
Originally built in 1992 at Lionel’s corporate headquarters in Chesterfield, Mich., the layout is an intricately recreated replica of one that was on display at the old Lionel store on Madison Avenue in New York City, where it stood from 1949 to 1953.
One might not expect eastern Suffolk County to be a small but mighty hub of model train nostalgia, but between the museum and an against-all-odds popular model train dealer less than 10 miles from it, it seems Greenport’s Long Island Railroad stop isn’t the last one for train fans after all. So far this year, the display has attracted some 7,000 visitors, says Don Fisher, president of the museum and chief steward of both its Riverhead and Greenport locations. And the busy season hasn’t even gotten started.
“It’s all about Christmas,” Fisher says.
Trees, Trimmings and Trains
Toy trains have been a staple of America’s Christmas traditions for well over a century. And Fisher has a pretty good idea of how that tradition got started. “It comes from the Old World,” he says. “In places like Germany and Austria, families would build creches and nativity scenes under their Christmas trees.” Over time, he says, the displays—called the Christmas putz in German—became more elaborate, with miniature villages and wintery streetscapes sprouting up around the creches.
As waves of European immigrants continued to land on U.S. shores through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many of those yule-time customs — such as the trees themselves — came with them. When Joshua Lionel Cohen, himself the son of German immigrants, started his company in 1900, he picked up on that tradition, and as his toy trains surged in popularity, Fisher says, “the loop of Lionel track around the tree made it into that Christmas tableaux.”
By the late 1950s, fueled in large part by holiday gift giving, Lionel was the world’s largest toymaker, and the little loop around the Christmas tree had been hauled down to the basement or up to the attic and transformed into a miniature world unto itself.
Of course, nothing lasts forever, and as tastes changed, digital distractions mounted and attention spans dwindled to mere nanoseconds, model railroading fell out of favor. Despite efforts to innovate, Lionel continued to lose money. The flagship store on Madison Avenue in Manhattan closed, and the company relocated to Michigan. The signature 1949 layout was put in storage and, according to Fisher, was later destroyed when the roof of the building it was kept in collapsed under the weight of too much snow.
Meanwhile the scores of local mom-and-pop hobby and hardware stores that sold and repaired toy trains for decades gradually began to fade away. But for those who had caught “the bug,” as Fisher calls it, model railroading proved a tough hobby to kick. Through the ‘80s and ‘90s, hobbyists and collectors mainly relied on snail-mail newsletters and traveling train shows to buy and trade gear, and scores of hyper-local model railroading clubs took root across the country — with a notable concentration on the East End and North Fork in particular. And although the Christmas connection continued to provide a yearly boost to the hobby’s visibility, opportunities for growth were few and far between.
Then came the internet.
Leap of Faith
In a world where just about anything can be had with the click of a mouse or the tap of an app, opening a brick-and-mortar retail store—especially one that’s entirely devoted to servicing the decidedly niche and notably seasonal hobby that is model railroading—requires a substantial leap of faith. But two years ago, Jeff Goldhammer and his business partner, Vincent Frustaci, did just that, launching New York Electric Trains on County Road 111 in Manorville—East End’s lone licensed Lionel dealer.
“At first we told everyone we were going to be a pop-up store and only stay open for four months,” says Goldhammer of the shop’s November 2022 launch. “But then we just stayed open because there was a pretty good following, and on top of that, it gave us a centralized location to do the internet business.”
An electrical engineer by trade, Goldhammer runs the store as a side hustle on nights and weekends, leaving the day-to-day operations to a legion of friends and family, including his wife, Melissa, his father, father-in-law, the eldest of his four children, “even got a cousin helping out around here,” he says. And he’s quick to admit that if it wasn’t for the company’s thriving internet trade, there’s no way the business would survive.
New York Electric Train shop in Manorville is the only Lionel model train dealer on the East End. Photos by Jeremy Garretson
“The only thing that sells in the store is either to collectors coming in to pick up stuff because they know we have it, or people coming in around Christmas time to buy something to get their kids started,” he says.
But New York Electric Trains also provides a welcome place for hobbyists to gather, and its shelves are lined with a plethora of lovingly preserved and intricately restored vintage trains. “People can come and pick stuff up, and see how it really looks and feels,” Goldhammer says. “You can’t do that on the internet.”
Over the last two-plus years, the business model has been so successful that Goldhammer and Frustaci recently leased out a second storefront just across the parking lot from the retail shop. A former True Value hardware store, the 5,000-square-foot space now serves as New York Electric Train’s storage and logistics hub to facilitate its ecommerce arm. It’s also home to a makeshift TV studio where Goldhammer hosts a train auction on Facebook that attracts more than 100 bidders each week.
And while the vintage and collectables market make up a sizeable chunk of sales, the market for newly made products is also growing. Lionel, which is now based in Concord, N.C., continues to make new, increasingly sophisticated locomotives every year.
“They’ve really stuck with the product,” Goldhammer says. “And they put out a good catalogue. A lot of the other toy train manufacturers aren’t really doing catalogs anymore. They do specialty runs for dealers, so they kind of want to pre-sell everything before they make it, whereas Lionel is still putting out a nice catalog and offering stuff for the collectors.”
Steam-ing Ahead
“It’s really come full circle,” Fisher says of how the internet has transformed today’s model railroading scene. “Now you can go to mom-and-pop shops all over the world.”
Even so, at its heart, building layouts and running trains remains a profoundly hands-on pursuit, requiring myriad skills not often put to use via an iPhone or video screen. “I use the term STEAM,” Fisher says, noting that the hobby requires a combination of science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics skills. “You have to plan the layout, construct the board, lay out and wire the track, build and paint the scenery,” he says. “I use that idea to encourage families on how to get younger people back into it.”
The fruit of all those skills is on full display at the Railroad Museum, which Fisher boasts has—perhaps facetiously—been described as the Walt Disney World of model railroading. And how that old Lionel layout made it to Riverhead is a story in and of itself.
“The Lionel company came under new management, and around 2009, and they decided to relocate to North Carolina,” Fisher says. Since the company didn’t want to bear the expense of moving the signature layout, “they were willing to donate it to us,” Fisher
says, “so long as we came and got it within two weeks. Otherwise, they were just going to throw it away.”
A group of volunteers sprang into action, including Southold-based trucker and friend of Fisher’s Bobby Pfluger, who was willing to make the run with his tractor-trailer in exchange for some mechanical equipment. The rest of the cadre flew out to Michigan to painstakingly disassemble, wrap and pack all the track, locomotives, rolling stock, scenery, accessories and the board itself, which they cut into 15 pieces, and load it all into containers for shipping.
“Funny thing is that most of the guys flew out to Detroit, and when they landed back here and were driving home from McArthur, who pulls up behind them on the highway but Bobby Pfluger, who was just finishing up the drive back,” Fisher recalls. “Some things just work out so perfectly.”
A two-year rebuilding and restoring project ensued, led by the museum’s then-vice president George Faeth, and in 2011 the reimagined display opened to the public. While much of the original design remains, volunteers, friends and fellow model railroaders continue to adapt and innovate the layout, adding original flourishes every year. A long-running partnership with Lionel has also led to the creation of a series of train cars themed around the museum and the North Fork, including last year’s tanker car commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Long Island wine industry.
“It’s the kind of hobby where everyone who’s involved always wants to share,” Fisher says. “Whether its kids in their teens or octogenarians, or at the train shows, or any of the clubs all across Suffolk County, or here at the museum, it really is a labor of love.”
The RMLI’s Riverhead location is open Saturdays from 10 a.m to 4 p.m. through Dec. 28. Admission is $15 for adults, $8 for kids aged 5 to 12, and free for infants and toddlers. Yearly memberships are also available. Visit RMLI.org for more information and special events.
