Infatuated With Train Parts: A Scott Griggs Story
Edited by Naomi Maynard Ayala
The parts infatuation became ingrained in my chromosomes after buying my first batch of Lionel parts from Harry Train in Toledo, Ohio. If we look at my DNA chart shown above, you will notice several interests and the intensity of the interests within the chromosomes. There are normal ones you would expect for a young man like girls, cars, model trains, and then you can see model train parts apparently must be a defective chromosome because the spike in that area of the DNA is off the charts.
I think this explains why many astute businesspeople would ask, “why would you fool around with train parts when you can make a lot more money selling the entire train?”. My defective parts chromosome phenomena is clearly the explanation behind why Trainz is so active in selling parts.
It all started when I was 10 years old, and my father bought me my first huge set of trains. However, the hook was undoubtedly set when I was 12 and my grandfather took away all of my trains because I wasn’t playing with them anymore. A while after that, my grandfather introduced me to Mr. Harry Train (yes, his real name) who operated a Lionel authorized service station in his basement, and he had a lot of parts. It was all uphill from there.
Let’s go back to when my grandfather finally gave me back my trains, but only after he got remarried and moved to Atlanta. I was still in Ohio at the time and my grandfather told me that the Harry Train, who ran Train's Hospital for Trains, was retiring, and all of his train parts were up for sale. Naturally, I had to check it out. Since it was 1975, and I was only 15, I had my parents take me.
I was amazed. Harry was selling all of his Lionel parts for $2,000, and all of his American Flyer Parts for a whopping $3,000. But since I really didn’t know anything about American Flyer, I settled on buying out just his Lionel parts inventory. Again, I was 15 and broke but my parents are amazing, so I was able to talk them into signing a $2,000 loan from the bank to finance my first business: “S&G Electric Train and Appliance Service”. That coupled with my recent “graduation” from the National Radio Institute correspondence course in servicing small appliances found in the back of a Popular Mechanics magazine, I was on top of the world.
My newly founded business was running smoothly out of my parents’ garage for a couple of years when I found out that Luelf Hardware in Toledo was closing shop. I knew that this was also a Lionel service station, so I had to go talk to the owner, Clarence Luelf. Clarence had a lot of parts, and most of them were in this beautiful wood parts cabinet. Over the course of three or four Saturdays, Clarence and I went through that parts cabinet drawer by drawer, and part by part while he lined-itemed how much he was willing to sell those parts to me for.
After we finished with coming up with a price for all the parts, Clarence asked me, “well what are you gonna pay me for the cabinet?”. I was dumbfounded, so I told him, “oh my God, I’ve already come up with a price for these parts. I don’t even know if I can afford the parts and the cabinet. Though it looks really nice.”
Clarence, being the fine gentleman that he was, said, “Scott, I appreciate all the time that you’ve spent with me, the Parts cabinet will be included at no cost.” So, all the parts and the cabinet were then loaded into the bed of my dad’s pick-up truck, and I took it back to S&G Electric Train and Appliance Service in my parents’ garage.
Although the location had not changed, the inventory had. I now had so many parts that it only seemed natural that I should start selling them. I designed and built a parts display and started taking it with me to the local train shows. Around the time I was 18, I came up with the idea to start painting the light bulbs and selling those too. You’d be surprised, but I sold a lot of light bulbs and a lot of parts.
I soon discovered George Tebolt while at the York show. He was the parts wholesale supplier and my main dealer where I got my parts fix. Not to say I wouldn’t find other dealers at the shows, but George and his wife Agne became my main source to buy even more parts!
During college, while getting my engineering degree and dating Milinda, the train and parts business was how I made money. The week after my graduation I married Milinda, and then after our month-long honeymoon traveling around the US in my carpeted full size chevy van, we moved to Erie, Pennsylvania for my first real job at the GE Locomotive plant.
At that time, I thought I should pack all of my parts away into my parents’ basement to be saved there until I retired and then I could start servicing and fixing model trains again like I had done in my youth. But lo and hold six months after we moved to Erie a former customer reached out to us to buy his collection, so Milinda and I went back to my parents’ house, loaded up all the parts, and moved everything into our two bedroom townhouse in Pennsylvania. And just like that, we started fixing and selling trains again.
My engineering career had me bouncing around for a bit from Erie, Pennsylvania, to Portsmouth, Virginia, then off to Cincinnati, Ohio, which cascaded us to Louisville, Kentucky, throwing us back to Cincinnati, and finally landing (and staying) in Atlanta, Georgia. During the ping-pong years of my career, I mainly concentrated on buying and selling trains, and just hoarded my parts.
About two years into our new life in Atlanta, Milinda and I made the jump and opened our first train store: “The Train Works”. Despite the fact that I was working full-time at GE and repairing trains on the weekend, I was certain that this was the time to start selling train parts again and we were off. However, after a few train shows and traveling all over the southeast and midwest with my parts, I decided there had to be a better, more efficient way to set-up and tear down my parts display.
As the old proverb goes, necessity is the mother of invention. So, during one Thanksgiving trip to visit Milinda’s parents I loaded up my trailer with plywood and 2x4s, and much to my in-laws’ dismay, I set-up shop in their garage. What came out of that long weekend, I affectionately called the “Parts Monster”.
The big cube shaped thing on wheels was able to accommodate the parts trays on the bottom and had shelves on the top with bin boxes. This design made train shows so much easier. When I would get to the show, I would pull the five parts trays out of the bottom to put them on top of the display tables, then I could remove the 30 x 30 inch plexiglass covers, bungee strap the unfolded accordion parts rack that was on top, and voila parts were ready to sell. Repacking at the end of the shows was just as easy, especially after we added an electric winch to our trailer. The winch would do all the heavy lifting when it came to the Parts Monster and then we just filled the rest of the trailer up with chicken boxes full of trains.
We had a good run, or so I thought, until about 1997 when both The Train Works and I went bankrupt. Unfortunately, every last asset owned by The Train Works was sold to Legacy Station including all the parts and the parts cabinet.
Post bankruptcy, I restarted my corporate career at Hewlett-Packard. Right around the same time, I discovered eBay and started buying train collections to resell online. Fast forward through the start-up of Trainz in my basement, through several years of struggling, and the eventual leap of faith of leasing out more and more warehouse space we continued to grow. All the while buying collections from people and companies that were dissolving and in many of those collections, there were also a few parts cabinets.
For the first couple of years in the warehouse, the haphazardly acquired parts were put in a spare corner of the warehouse and moved around when that space was no longer “spare”. After paying for too many man hours to continuously move the neglected parts from one nook of the warehouse to another, they were finally rehomed to pallets because everyone at Trainz was too busy selling trains to worry about the parts.
Nevertheless, like every budding business, we always needed more cash, and I was always trying to find more ways to make that happen. So, at some point, I realized we had accumulated four or five pallets worth of just parts, and luckily, I was also aware of the money tied up in those parts.
Unfortunately, I also remember thinking that I was probably the only one who knew what they were, how much value they actually held, and the only way I could turn them into money was if I started identifying each part and getting them listed online to sell along with everything else. But, since I was still working at Hewlett-Packard at that time, I had to figure this all out afterhours. My great idea turned into several weekends of sorting and triaging parts in my house that took over like kudzu in my game room, workshop, and even part of the garage.
When I was ready to start identifying them, I recruited some young people from my church youth group, and from the Boy Scout group that I was involved in. They came over on Saturdays to help count and photograph the parts after I had identified what the part numbers were. Once all of that was taken care of, I would write the titles and price them before taking the completed parts bags into Trainz on Mondays for someone else to enter into the newly created parts system and list them to sell online.
Not to make it more complicated than it was, because it was complicated, but the parts system and website were completely separate from where Trainz itemized and listed everything else, so over time, and as Trainz got bigger, that setup became very awkward, distracting, and problematic. Eventually, we had bigger fish to fry so we shut down the unintegrated parts site and again the parts business was shelved for at least another year or so.
Operation of the parts business got back up and running when we finally got the IT horsepower to add new sections to the website and to eBay so we could list parts in the same way as we did everything else we sold at Trainz. However, all of this meant we had to do brand new data entry for every part.
Once again, I recruited more young people to come to my basement to sort, triage, identify, photograph, count, and bag all of those little parts so they were ready to take into Trainz to list. Eventually, we built a mezzanine in one of the buildings at Trainz that became our ‘parts’ room and this meant we finally had room to work at Trainz on Saturdays to do all the tasks once performed in my basement all while also getting parts put away and ready for sale.
It was so efficient that I worked almost every Saturday for a period of 10 years (from approximately 2010 to 2020) with my group of teenagers (sometimes having zero or six of them) building up the Parts inventory. One of the perks of working on Saturdays was that Milinda and I would take the teenagers out for a free lunch. Here’s a picture of all of us one day at Cracker Barrel. Included in this picture are two young men who repaired Parts and the other team members who counted, photographed, created listings, and put the parts away.
Then I got lucky in 2020, after moving to a new home on Lake Lanier and creating a full-time Parts team to handle all of the minutia associated with it, I stopped working on parts every Saturday. Now they have an amazing handle on maintaining an inventory of over 30,000 unique parts, and we still create new listings all the time.
Through my parts journey, we have bought out numerous parts distributors/manufacturers, dealers, and many hobby shops. The first major parts collection that we bought was the ‘Gandy Dancers’ train store in Atlanta. The owner also had a parts room with a large collection of parts that were identified by model number on the bins, and this made it very easy for my Parts group to now add those to our Parts system instead of me having to identify each one.
Some of the biggest parts acquisitions were Empire Hobbies, George Tebolt, Chris Rossbach aka Restoration Train Parts, DEW Associates, North Lima Train Works, Bob Ford, Ed Vanderlinden, Brasseur’s Trains, Ted Nyerges Screws from Len Carparelli, Jill Sisco, Ron Stanczyk, and Electric Norman When we acquired the massive parts inventory of George Tebolt, my parts journey came full circle and Trainz.com was cemented as a major player in the wholesale parts business. However, the three 53 foot tractor trailer loads of pallets of surplus modern Lionel parts from the North Lima Train Works deal didn’t hurt us either. Most recently in 2024 we also bought out the leftover parts from Pride Lines and McCoy manufacturing.
Trainz also entered into the custom parts manufacturing business in 2024 with the CTC lock on. Being a prime competitor in the parts business means that at last count we have over 100 pallets of parts. Some of these pallets are awaiting triage and entry, and some pallets are wholesale bins of huge quantities of the same part. Here is a picture of part of our Parts warehouse in 2024.
My infatuation with parts has benefited the company in many ways. Selling as well as having a wide variety of parts on hand at Trainz has been very important to our service technicians while repairing trains. Also, all of our parts are cataloged and barcoded and tracked by our parts inventory management system making it easy for our technicians to find when needed as well as our parts and shipping crews to be able to pick the correct parts when they’re ordered for sale.
I am very passionate about helping the Hobby, and I believe it’s this crazy train parts chromosome that propels me to want to help others service and repair their trains. If you need parts, we’ve created a detailed grid on our website to help you identify the parts you’re looking for without all of the confusion. Finding parts is especially tricky with things like bells, wheels, and even boiler fronts that look the same between standard gauge and Postwar, but when it comes down to it, they're different sizes.
It’s also why we spend so much time and put so much attention into identifying rivets and screws with all of the proper dimensions and thread patterns so that you can be sure that what you are ordering is what you need and that is exactly what you’re going to get. So not only do we want to sell parts, but we want to provide you with an excellent resource on easily finding the parts you need on Trainz.com.
All of our parts are shipped either the same day or the next day after they're ordered, so you can count on getting your parts quickly when you need them. We have also incorporated our Parts database into our wish list at Trainz.com. This makes it easy for you search a particular part you need by part number (or description if you don’t know the part number), and if we have ever had that part listed on Trainz.com before but we do not currently have it in-stock, you are able to add it to your wish list. Then the next time that specific part becomes available you will get an email notification that you can buy it while it is in-stock.
We now also have over 3,000 wholesale parts available. This has been by far the largest selection of parts amongst all repair stations and parts dealers in the industry. Being the leader in the industry allows us to offer great discounts on our expensive wholesale parts like: buy 12 you get 30% off; buy 50 you get 40% off; and buy 100 you get 50% off. We basically offer everything on our wholesale plan that we have a quantity of over 200 in-stock. Here is another shot of another section of our parts warehouse.
As of 2024 our Parts team had nine amazing people. We have some very specialized team members including one person who triages and sorts parts. All he does every day is dump parts bins that we have from the triage room, and sorts them out, identifies them, and puts them in bags to be sent over to the parts processing team. Then we have another person whose job is to repair and assemble parts. The parts processing team takes care of counting, photographing, and adding the parts to our database.
Overseeing things is our Parts team lead, Travis, who has his hands full making sure everything gets done as we are adding over 500 parts per week to our bins, and we are striving to do even more. In 2024 we added 425 exploded view parts diagrams of postwar, MPC, and modern era trains that have all our parts linked to diagrams so you can look at the diagram, find exactly what you need and then click on the part and add it right to your shopping cart! We think it is the greatest thing since sliced bread when it comes to finding and ordering parts! We plan to further expand this in 2025. Here is an example of one of these diagrams. You can find all of them here.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned to the next chapter of the Parts business at Trainz.com.