Johnston’s Electric Train Shop was a family-owned business in St Louis for about 50 years. As its name suggests, it was a storefront in St Louis’s Dutchtown neighborhood, and advertised itself as St Louis’ first hobby shop that specialized in trains.
But there’s more to the story. This is a classic American Dream story, a small business idea borne of financial hardship that led to owning the building it operated out of and employing 11 people.
Humble beginnings
An article from a 1957 issue of All Aboard, the Lionel corporate newsletter, stated the Johnstons started out selling trains out of their second-floor apartment. It wouldn’t have been an unusual arrangement for them to own the building and rent out the other units, but given he was only 24 years old at the time, they may have been renting. Their daughter-in-law, Pam Johnston, told the same story to the St Louis Post Dispatch in 1974.
According to the 1957 Lionel newsletter article, Eugene and Violet Johnston married December 1, 1928, and he bought two train sets for their first Christmas together. The next year, the stock market crashed and demand for his services as an interior decorator dried up. He passed his time building displays for the trains. Then, at Christmas 1929, he decided to sell the whole setup. His ad brought a crowd to the house and the trains sold immediately. Model Railroader published an abbreviated account from Violet Johnston in 1947, quoting her as saying their business started with the sale of two used electric trains in 1929.
A business borne of necessity
Showing an entrepreneurial streak, Johnston started buying used trains and raw materials for displays with whatever money he could scrounge up. He repaired the trains and built displays to sell at Christmas again.
He left a paper trail that you can still find today. In the early 1930s he ran small classified ads in the St Louis Post-Dispatch offering an electric train for sale, with a phone number. The earliest such ad I could find was in the December 14, 1930 issue of the St Louis Post-Dispatch. The address, 3826 Minnesota Avenue, was a wood shingle multi-family flat in the Dutchtown neighborhood of south St. Louis. In time, the ads offered a selection of trains for sale, and offered trade-ins in addition to straight sales.
The E.R. Johnston Electric Toy Train Co.
Soon, Eugene Johnston developed a reputation as a train expert. He wrote to Lionel asking about selling new trains. Lionel put him in touch with a local distributor. At first he bought trains with profits from the previous day, operating hand to mouth. But soon the business grew larger than they could accommodate out of a second-floor apartment. They set up shop, literally, on the first floor of the apartment building where they lived, with proper counter space, shelves, and a permanent train display. By then, the business employed both Eugene and Violet.
According to a short writeup in the October 1947 issue of Model Railroader, Johnston added scale model railroading in 1935, alongside Lionel tinplate. By May 1939, this included products from William K. Walthers, and Walthers was listing the E.R. Johnston Electric Toy Train Co. as one of its dealers in ads in Model Railroader. Also around 1935, the Johnstons hired their first outside employee.
Surviving photos I’ve seen of the shop interior suggest Eugene Johnston may have built the store fixtures himself from supplies he found at Central Hardware. He would have had the skills to do it. The 1957 All Aboard account noted Eugene and Violet dabbled in rehabilitating real estate on the side.
Johnston’s Electric Train Shop on Chippewa
In mid-1947, a former shoe repair business went up for sale a couple of blocks away from their apartment, at 3118 Chippewa, three miles almost due east of Stan Musial and Biggie’s restaurant on the old Route 66. By October 1947, Johnston’s had moved into this space, and city records suggest the family lived on the second floor. Electric trains became big business after World War II, so it was easy to justify a storefront on a busier street with better visibility. More room and more traffic meant more business and better profits. And living upstairs meant no longer paying rent.
Model Railroader mentioned the move in its October 1947 issue, noting the new address and stating it was one of the few hobby shops in the country that sold model trains exclusively. It said Violet Johnston handled sales while Eugene handled repairs along with one other employee, and they performed 3,320 repairs in 1946.
By the mid 1950s, Johnston’s employed a total of 11 people.
Johnston’s operated out of this storefront, about a mile southwest of where the Cherokee antique district is today, for about three decades. Stories about Johnston’s occasionally pop up in model train forums. The stories include rumors about treasures the family kept in the basement of the building. Apparently the owners encouraged the rumors. Having been buying used trains since 1929, Eugene certainly would have had an opportunity to accumulate a lot of interesting items. It would have been natural to keep some of them.
The second generation of Johnstons selling electric trains
The cover story of Classic Toy Trains October 2004 issue was titled “1956: The Last Perfect Year.” It’s not like Lionel trains went out of style like pet rocks. But demand went into a slow decline in the second half of the decade. The population of the city of St. Louis also started a slow decline around the same time, with middle class families choosing to move to the suburbs.
Eugene Johnston died October 21, 1966, aged 60, at Lutheran Hospital in St. Louis. His wife, Violet Johnston, died March 8, 1974, aged 63, also at Lutheran Hospital. Their son, Korean War veteran Gilbert (Chuck) Johnston and his wife, Pam Beggs Johnston, took over the business.
In a newspaper article about the electric train industry that ran in the December 16, 1974 issue of the St Louis Post Dispatch, Pam Johnston stated they stayed in business selling higher-end trains than the discount stores. They said a significant source of business was people buying a cheap train set from a discounter, the locomotive breaking, and then coming to Johnston’s to buy a more durable replacement.
The implication was that the market for electric trains was declining. And it was. Lionel and Tyco had some success in the 1970s. But it wasn’t the booming business it had been in the 1950s. And in the Johnstons’ case, it didn’t help that hobby shops were opening up elsewhere in the city and in the suburbs. The second-generation Johnstons were living in the suburb of Affton, and commuting seven or eight miles from Affton to an inner city storefront to compete with suburban hobby shops may have contributed to their decision to close the business and get corporate jobs.
Moving on from selling trains
Johnston’s seems to have closed down sometime in 1978. The last advertisement I can find for them ran in the St Louis Post Dispatch in January 1978. Their trail goes cold in Model Railroader earlier than that, after the January 1977 issue. This suggests they may have planned a wind-down of the business, as they would have to purchase advertising in Model Railroader further in advance than in the local newspaper. Their ads in Model Railroader right up to January 1977 used the old-fashioned exchange-style phone number, starting with two letters, which suggests they may have bought the ads years in advance. That convention phased out in the 1960s.
After the store closed, Pam took a job at TWA, the now-defunct airline. Chuck took a job at Anheuser-Busch, running their first computer system. Both of them held those jobs until retirement. Pam died in June 2014, aged 68, and Chuck died in November 2021, aged 88.
Some artifacts from the storefront survive in private collections in St Louis. Rumor is local collectors acquired both the neon signage and the front door.
Final fate
The multifamily flat on Minnesota where a newly married Eugene Johnston sold his train out of desperation, starting a small empire, was demolished in 2003. Minnesota Avenue is mostly a residential street, paved with red bricks, lined with a mix of single and multi-family dwellings. The historic brick homes and red brick street make it easy to imagine what the street looked like a century ago.
The storefront on Chippewa saw heavy turnover after the late 1970s. In the early 2000s, a ramp was added improve accessibility and a recording studio briefly operated out of the space, followed by a computer store.
It changed hands in the early 2020s and was converted to residential use, and in 2022, the current owners pulled a permit to convert the building into a single family residence. When these buildings were built, Chippewa was a busy street through a mixed-use neighborhood, with storefronts near the intersections and pure residential dwellings in between. Changes in population density, traffic, and modern shopping habits mean there is no longer a need for so many storefronts along Chippewa, so converting some of those turn-of-the-previous-century storefronts to single-family homes means fewer of these old buildings remain vacant.
I saw a reference to Johnston’s in Louis H. Hertz’ 1954 book titled Making Your Model Railroad sometime around 2004. Because I worked very close to that area at the time, I went looking for it. After 25 years, no sign of the former business remained. I wasn’t completely surprised. But I held out faint hope because that area was something of a time capsule back then, with shuttered businesses still leaving traces of themselves behind, sometimes for decades. Not this one, though. The relics had all been salvaged and used to adorn hobbyists’ train rooms. I think that’s better than leaving them to waste away in the elements.
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.