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Neighborhood Joint

All Trains, All the Time

A go-to for collectors and modelers, Trainworld, a family business started by the current manager’s grandfather, has had its store in Kensington, Brooklyn, for about 30 years.Credit...Dan Balilty for The New York Times

Trainworld, a family-owned store that sits fittingly under an elevated section of the F train in Brooklyn, is a modeler’s dream.

Its walls are lined with MTH locomotives, wooden Thomas & Friends tracks and Piko freight cars. Stacks of Lionel Polar Express starter sets are piled high near collector bait like the company’s Pennsylvania Railroad GG1, with simulated sparks. Racks of striped engineer hats sit alongside shelves of plastic shrubs, tunnel molds and inch-tall people.

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The store is located under the elevated F subway line.Credit...Dan Balilty for The New York Times

And at the store’s center is a 16-foot platform with elevated tracks, Victorian houses, working lampposts, a bank, and a Sunoco gas station, through which three trains travel, led by a locomotive that puffs rings of maple-sugar-scented steam.

For the 27 years Joannie DeVito has worked at Trainworld, she has observed its effect on even the most buttoned-up modelers.

“It could be a 60-year-old man,” she said, “but you bring him into this store, and it’s like letting a kid loose in Toys ‘R’ Us.”

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“It could be a 60-year-old man,” one employee said, “but you bring him into this store, and it’s like letting a kid loose in Toys ‘R’ Us.”Credit...Dan Balilty for The New York Times

At any time of year, you could find hobbyists here talking about the merits of modeling on O scale versus HO. But the store sees its most foot traffic during the holidays, when seasonal enthusiasts take their sets out of storage and ring them around their trees.

By her own estimation, Kathy Thompson has been coming to Trainworld for 25 years. Every Christmas, she installs the eight-foot set she inherited from her grandfather — a wintry village on one side, a summertime farm on the other — on the porch of her home in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

That afternoon she was buying shrubs to replace some tired ones, while her husband, Mike, stocked up on spare parts. He didn’t want to find himself, he said, in an all-too-familiar position: “You put everything up, and all of a sudden two bulbs aren’t working.”

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Trainworld sees its most foot traffic during the holiday season, when fair-weather enthusiasts take their sets out of storage and ring them around their trees.Credit...Dan Balilty for The New York Times

Christmas even figures in the family legend that led to Trainworld’s founding in 1968. Anthony Bianco II, the store’s manager, recounted the tale of his grandfather discovering a passion for model trains.

“One of his first sets that he bought, he set it up around the Christmas tree, and all the kids loved it,” he said, “but then he found out how much it was worth — packed it up and sold it.”

After that, his grandfather started selling sets out of his home — an operation that involved his wife and all five of his children — and out of the beauty parlor he ran on Kings Highway, before opening a store on Avenue M. (About 30 years ago, the business moved to this location, at 751 McDonald Avenue.) Today Mr. Bianco’s two cousins work at the store, and his father, also Anthony, remains one of the owners. Another uncle and cousin, both named Ken, operate a sister store in Long Island, where Bobby Baccalieri’s fateful whacking in “The Sopranos” was filmed.

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A young customer at Trainworld, in Kensington, Brooklyn.Credit...Dan Balilty for The New York Times

A newcomer to the Brooklyn store’s staff is Marc Hamon, 26, of Teaneck, N.J. His 90-minute commute is mostly by bus, he said, and the subway car he gets is often, unluckily, a beat-up old Pullman R46, but he can look forward to a ride on the shinier, newer Alstom R160 he loves.

Still, with few stores like Trainworld near his home, it’s worth the trek to him, a collector since he was in diapers. His current favorite: an Atlas model of a Providence & Worcester freight train, the timetable of which he knew down to the minute as a boy in Connecticut.

“I grew up on that railroad going by,” he said — which gets to what he loves about modeling. “I like the aspect of being able to recreate something from real life.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section MB, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: For 5 Decades, Keeping Modelers on Track. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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