Last Updated on October 31, 2026 by Dave Farquhar
If you want to know where to buy Lionel trains in St. Louis, you have a lot of choices. It’s more than possible to make a day of train shopping in St. Louis.
I’ve never seen a comprehensive list of shops, so I made my own. If you know of any place I missed, I apologize. Please leave a comment and I will add it.
Andy’s Toys (8460 Watson Rd, St. Louis MO 63119). Andy’s is a vintage toy shop, so it doesn’t specialize in Lionel, but occasionally he has some vintage Lionel in stock. He also almost always has a good selection of vintage diecast vehicles to outfit a vintage layout.
Target Model Trains (3323 Lemay Ferry Rd, St. Louis MO 63125) is the newest store on this list, carrying a good selection of HO scale, as well as vintage Lionel, both prewar and postwar.
Mark Twain Hobby Center (2793 W Clay St., St. Charles MO 63301). Mark Twain is another full-line hobby shop, but it carries a reasonable selection of trains, including some new-production Lionel.
Menard’s (various locations). Yes, this home improvement chain sells trains. Menard’s carries a few Lionel train sets, some buildings, and its own house brand of track and O gauge train cars. Of course, it’s also a good place to buy lumber, wire, and other necessities for your layout.
Rodney’s Trains (9622 Gravois Rd., St. Louis MO 63123). Rodney’s has a good selection of new Lionel and an even better selection of vintage Lionel, including postwar and prewar, even the old, large Standard Gauge trains. The owner collects prewar Lionel trains so his selection of prewar is extensive. Rodney’s also has the best selection of American Flyer and Marx trains in St. Louis.
Schaefer’s (11659 Gravois Rd., St. Louis MO 63126). Schaefer’s is a full-line hobby shop. Its founder was a huge R/C plane enthusiast but Schaefer’s train section is reasonable. In recent years Schaefer’s started dealing in vintage Lionel in addition to new, likely due to other Lionel shops closing.
Train Town (9832 Manchester, St. Louis MO 63119). Train Town specializes in trains, as its name suggests. The owner is a noted postwar Lionel collector, so the store has a large selection of postwar Lionel trains, though it isn’t devoid of prewar trains either.
Planning a circuit
It’s possible to start at one end of St. Louis and work your way north or south and catch most of these stores. Start at Target Model Trains and work your way north to Schaefer’s, then Rodney’s, then Andy’s, north to Train Town, then north to Mark Twain Hobby Center. Or you can start north and work your way south. Keep in mind if you try to visit all of the stores in a single day, you’ll only be able to spend about 30 minutes in each one. On average, the stores are about 20 minutes from each other.
A number of good shops of old like Electric Train Outlet and Switch Stand have sadly gone the way of Johnston’s Electric Trains, but there are still some good shops left in St. Louis.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.