Model train sales chug along
For enthusiasts in pandemic, ‘a little piece of a perfect world’ shapes up as orders keep rolling
BERLIN — Last spring, the managers at Märklin, the 162-year-old maker of model trains in Germany, were surprised by something unexpected in the sales reports.
“We started to notice a serious uptick in orders,” said Florian Sieber, a director at Märklin. The jump continued into summer — a further surprise, he said, because that is “when people don’t usually buy indoor train sets.”
But buy they did.
In November, Märklin’s monthly orders were up 70% over the previous year. The company’s video introducing its new trains and accessories, posted in January, has been viewed more than 165,000 times.
Along with baking and jigsaw puzzles earlier in the pandemic, model trains are among the passions being rediscovered while people are cooped up indoors. Several companies that make trains are reporting jumps in sales. For many people, the chance to create a separate, better world in the living room — with stunning mountains, tiny chugging locomotives and communities of inch-high people where no one needs a mask — is hard to resist.
“Outside, there is total chaos, but inside, around my little train set, it is quiet, it is picturesque,” said Magnus Hellstrom, 48, a high school teacher in Sweden who has indulged in his hobby while working from home during lockdowns.
“It’s a little piece of a perfect world,” he said.
Hellstrom is one of many Märklin enthusiasts. The company, which filed for bankruptcy protection over a decade ago, is now for the first time in years hiring new apprentices to learn the precise work of making superdetailed tiny trains.
“We’re booming so much, it’s hard to keep up,” said Maria Huta, 64, who has assembled trains for 38 years at the company’s main facility in Göppingen, a town 25 miles southeast of Stuttgart, where the company was founded.
The factory building is more than a century old, and touring the facility is a trip back in time: a factory floor with skilled manual laborers toiling over workbenches. Huta and her colleagues often use a microscope to attach tiny details such as bells or handrails. The company employs about 1,170 full-time employees at its two locations. (The other location is in Gyor, Hungary.)
The Märklin trains come in three scales, with H0-gauge models the most popular. A high-end Gauge 1 locomotive, made up of several thousand individual parts, can cost up to $4,200 new (and much more if the train becomes a collectors’ item), although lower-cost locomotives, composed of about 300 parts, sell for about one-tenth of the price. Märklin also makes LGB trains, which are larger and designed to be set up outdoors.
The trains can be controlled by computer console or by a phone app, with different trains on the same track going different speeds or traveling different circuits. Märklin even added the option of controlling the trains via train engineer simulator software, allowing users to control their model train as if they were sitting in the engineer’s chair.
“It is a traditional toy that through digital functions, like sound and light, has become more and more like a real train,” said Uwe Müller, who was a product manager at Märklin for 15 years and now runs the Märklineum, the company’s museum.