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In 1954, a group of sixty-eight men met in a barn in Yardley, Pennsylvania to discuss the state of their hobby.   That hobby was toy trains.  At a time when the real thing was diminishing in importance—especially on the passenger side—and the companies that made the replicas were sliding toward mediocrity, these men were concerned with preserving the integrity of the hobby.  This was especially true for those who found enjoyment and profit in collecting toy trains from the past.  To this end, this group organized themselves into what was to become the Train Collectors Association (TCA).  Joined that same year by a group on the West Coast, the TCA became, almost instantaneously, a national group.  

While the stated purpose of the group was to preserve the toy train hobby, the ulterior motive of many was to protect themselves from their fellow members.  This was especially true when it came to the sale of the old, collectable items since some were on the market that had been forged, repaired with new parts but sold as originals, and misrepresented as to either condition and manufacturing date.  To this end, the TCA set up a system of constantly evolving standards relating to how an item could be described.   To maintain this honesty the TCA became an arbitrator between members when dealing with the sale of trains and train related items to the point where, if found guilty of any kind of misrepresentation and unwilling to compensate the fellow member for this deception, a member could be removed from the rolls.  In addition, to assure the integrity of the organization, in order for someone to join they had to be recommended, in writing, by two members who would attest to the honesty and reliability of the applicant.  While a large number of the members of TCA were just hobbyists that were interested in running their trains and building layouts either of their own or with other hobbyist, there was a distinct group of members whose sole interest was having a collection of rare and hard to find trains and adding to it. 

Whatever the motivation, the initial group grew and multiplied. By 1957, it was incorporated in Pennsylvania and by 1977 it received nonprofit status by the IRS.  Using this status, the Association built its national headquarters in Strasburg, Pennsylvania where, in the same year, it also built The National Toy Train Museum.  Also, for administrative purpose and to make the hobby more locally accessible, the Association was broken into twenty division spread across the country.  One of these was the Eastern Division.

For whatever reason, there is a high concentration of toy train enthusiast in the eastern United States.   There may be a number of reasons why this area is rife with toy train operators and collectors but a few stand out.   Number one may be that  this area is high the number of houses which are constructed over open cellars where trains can be run out of the way of the rest of the household.  Or it could be that, at one time, the area was home to some of the largest and most famous real railroads—New York Central, Pennsylvania Railroad, Baltimore and Ohio, Chesapeake.  Couple these factors with the aging of the population, many of whom worked for these lines and were nostalgic for the good old days, and you had a prime area for modeling trains .  Given this demographic, it is not hard to see why the TCA started here and why one of its more active divisions is located in this area.  Headquartered in Pennsylvania, the Eastern Division draws its members from part or all of the states of Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia and the District of Columbia.  The epicenter of this division is at or near southern Pennsylvania, which comes closest to the city of York.    

This city, some dozen or so miles south of the state capitol, Harrisburg, and within easy driving distance of most of the larger cities in the northeast is located in a rural area where farming is a major occupation.  For that reason, the county built its fair ground on the edge of the city to host an annual agricultural fair complete with exhibits and horse races.  Since this fair took only a week out of the ground’s schedule it was not long before other organizations hired the grounds to put on shows of their own.  Beginning in 1967, for two weeks out of the year the Eastern Division took over this facility.

Even before its inception, members of TCA got together to exchange train items.  Someone had a locomotive that no longer interested them.   A member tired of a particular type of livery and wanted to trade it for that of another railroad line.  A modeler who was redoing his layout and had excess track or needed more track and did not want to buy it new.  Trains, rolling stock and accessories broke down and need parts that could be cannibalized from used items that belonged to someone else. For whatever reason, there were those that had something and those that wanted to buy or trade for it.  Often it was just an even swap but in some cases, money exchanged hands for especially rare items.

These swap meets generally were held within a particular club but as the individual clubs became involved in divisions of the TCA the meets got larger too.  Since they now covered larger areas, these swap meets had to be scheduled at specific times and places to accommodate larger groups.  As the largest division and because it soon held the largest of these meets, the Eastern Division needed a place to hold this meet.  It settled on the York County Fair Grounds.

As long as it was a swap meet and what commerce was done, was done between members of the same organization, the state tax department kept their noses out of it, even when the amounts of money would become large.  In order to preserve this tax-free environment, the Eastern Division and TCA declared the meet a closed club event, open to members only.   While TCA members, regardless of what division they belonged to, were eligible to attend, nonTCAmembers could attend only once in their lifetime if, during that once, they were sponsored by a member.  This made the meet very exclusive, desirable, and a big incentive for joining TCA.

It also developed in another way.  While the TCA encompasses all scales and types of toy trains from the tiny Z-scale (1:122) to live steam, the York meet evolved into one that showcased primarily O-gauge trains and accessories.  While there were some S-gauge (1:64) being sold to satisfy those who dabbled in this near O-gauge scale, the larger size prevailed.    In so doing, this meet drew the largest number of O-gauge collectors and operators in the country.

As news of the meet and the demographics of those who would attend began to spread through the hobby, more and more commercial vendors wanted to be come involved.  Since the only requirement for attending, either as a buyer or seller, was membership in TCA, both hobbyists and those that sold to them joined with the specific purpose of being admitted to York.    By and large, these new members had no interest in preserving their hobby except as it specifically effected them.  Commercial sellers joined to make the market available to them.   For those who collected trains or sold to collectors, the age-old adages of buy cheap/sell dear and may the best man win figured in to dealings.  Now, rather than swapping new items, many factory fresh products were being sold by dealers that had regular brick and mortar stores as far away as Boston, Miami and Chicago.  Soon, too, the manufacturers of trains and train related items set up displays of their latest items and prototypes of items to come.  Many innovations by train and accessory manufacturers made their initial appearance at this meet.  By the nineteen nineties, the two dates for the York meet—generally the third Friday and Saturday of October and April—were the biggest event on any train hobbyist’s calendar and attended by hobbyists from all over the country.  So many made it an biannual event that they would make their motel accommodations six months to a year in advance and trying to get a room within twenty miles of York during the week of the meet was impossible.     Motel clerks enjoyed laughing at those wanting last minute rooms.

So large did the demand for items become that their sale soon spilled beyond the fair grounds and the two days reserved for it.  Venders began setting up in motel rooms and parking lots as early as Monday and buyers flocked to them in ever-increasing numbers.  These “Bandit” sales had the advantage of offering a lot of bargains in new and slightly used items but the disadvantage of not being sanction by the TCA.  At least those items sold on the fair grounds, since the seller had to be a TCA member, had the backing of the Association and, if the buyer felt cheated in some way, there was some recourse.  The Bandit buyers had to abide by caveat emptor. 

Many were willing to take the chance; many were not.  Either way over twenty thousand members, their kith and kin, showed up in York twice a year to buy, sell, and renew friendships with fellow hobbyists.  If they were lucky, they might even run into Neil Young, Mandy Patinkin, or a CEO of a toy train company.  York was the Mecca for toy train hobbyists, something they had to do at least once before they died.  And once done, was done again and again. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2006 at 11:57 pm and is filed under Electric Trains. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.