Midtown Shop Leaves Its Competition, and Its Trains, in the Dust
Great profile of midtown’s the Red Caboose, one of the last brick and mortar stores for train and bus model hobbyists left in Manhattan, from The New York Times.
“You’re either a bus guy or a train guy,” Arnold Hochberg said the other day. He has a collection of more than 500 model buses. He is a bus guy.
Mr. Hochberg, a 60-year-old salesman, was browsing in the basement of a small Midtown Manhattan office building, pointing into a display containing model buses and locomotives.
“That’s a Setra touring bus,” he said. “It’s German.”
He gestured to another. “That’s a Triboro Coach,” he said wistfully. “They used to go back and forth from La Guardia. Until not that long ago even.”
New York City might seem a lonely place for such enthusiasts, but Mr. Hochberg was within a subterranean shop cluttered with thousands of models and figurines known as the Red Caboose, a bedrock of the city’s hobbyist community — particularly for model train collectors — since 1970.
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